LONDON (AP) — DNA from a Neanderthal skeleton is giving powerful backing to the theory that all humanity descended from an “African Eve” about 100,000 to 200,000 years ago — and that Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end.

Genetic differences indicate the Neanderthals were a different species from the early humans who swept them aside in Europe and western Asia — although they appear to have split from a common ancestor a half-million years ago, according to German and U.S. scientists.

The DNA test “clearly lends support to this idea about our ancestry: that we have all come out of Africa quite recently in history,” said Svante Paabo, who worked on the research at the Zoological Institute at the University of Munich.

Critics of that theory say the argument will rage on, and they await the results of many more DNA tests.

“It is a brilliant, innovative piece of work. I just doubt that it can be faulted on technical grounds,” Milford H. Wolpoff, professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. But he says the researchers have drawn hasty conclusions.

The findings were published in Cell, a journal based in Cambridge, Mass., and outlined Thursday at a news conference in London. Paabo said his results were independently confirmed at Pennsylvania State University.

The Munich team took a small sample — 0.4 grams — from the upper arm bone of a skeleton found in 1857 in the Neander Valley near Duesseldorf — the first Neanderthal skeleton ever found.

Comparing 378 base pairs of the Neanderthal’s mitochondrial DNA to that of modern humans, the researchers found an average of 27 differences between modern and Neanderthal DNA — far more than the typical variation of eight among modern humans.

Mitochondria, the structures within human cells that help produce energy, have their own genes. These genes are passed down the female line with only the occasional mutation.

Paabo cautioned that the study of more Neanderthal DNA samples might turn up some mixing, and thus confirm the possibility of some interbreeding between Neanderthals and our Cro-Magnon ancestors.

Even if Neanderthals were not our ancestors, they were tantalizingly similar. They walked erect, used tools and there is evidence that they coexisted and learned some skills from Cro-Magnon people.

One striking difference is that Neanderthals were bigger than modern humans and had larger brains.

“Any superiority that modern humans had was probably a very slight one at time and that’s why it took so long for the Neanderthals to be replaced,” said Chris Stringer, a researcher at London’s Natural History Museum.

“Of course this is only one specimen ... but it fits so very well with the view of one side of the argument about Neanderthals — that they are very distinct, that they are not our ancestor — that I think it goes a very long way toward resolving the Neanderthal problem,” Stringer said.

Wolpoff, the University of Michigan anthropology professor, argued that the fact that a trait or gene sequence seen in ancient people is absent from moderns doesn’t mean that one is not the ancestor of the other. The trait could simply have disappeared over time.

If there is a uniform difference between Neanderthal and modern DNA, he added, that may be because widespread mingling of populations has produced uniformity now. And, he added, a divergence in mitochondrial DNA does not necessarily mean a divergence of species.

“What they should be saying is that the argument has just begun,” Wolpoff said.

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Scientists Report Breakthrough in Evolution Theory (970725)

PASADENA, Calif. — A 90-degree shift of the Earth’s early continents — in which the North and South Poles wound up at the equator — may have played a major role in the evolutionary explosion that speeded up the development of life, scientists said.

A report to be published Friday in the journal Science said the “big bang,” a sudden spurt in the evolutionary process, began about 530 million years ago and proceeded at a rate 20 times faster than anything that has happened since.

What caused that spurt has long been a mystery perplexing scientists; now experts at the California Institute of Technology say they may have part of the answer.

Caltech geologists Joseph Kirschvink and David Evans and Robert Ripperdan of the Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Tennessee said the relatively sudden diversification of life forms took place at the same time as Earth’s then-super continents took a 90-degree turn, shifting the polar masses to the equator and putting equatorial points at the poles.

Both events occurred during the so-called Cambrian period when a major reorganization of the Earth’s crust took place.

They said in Science that all the data “indicate that rapid continental drift occurred during the same time interval as the Cambrian evolutionary diversification and, therefore, the two events may be related.”

Kirschvink said, “Life diversified like crazy about a half a billion years ago, and about 15 million years later life’s diversity had stabilized at much higher levels. What actually happened is one of the outstanding mysteries of the biosphere.”

He added that the geophysical evidence collected from rocks deposited before, during and after the evolutionary speedup, “demonstrate that all of the major continents experienced a burst of motion during the same interval of time.”

Evans told Reuters the study indicated that in order to change their positions so radically, the super continents — which broke up about 150 million years ago to form today’s continents — would have traveled several feet per year over a 10 million to 15 million year period.

The phenomenon is known as “true polar wander,” in which the entire solid part of the planet moves together. Typical continental migration rates today, which are caused by heat convection in the Earth’s crust, are only a few inches a year, Evans said.

Kirschvink said the climatic changes, in which life forms existing in cold temperatures were thrust into warmer regions, and vice versa, forced their diversification as they adapted to their new environments.

It also produced a survival of the fittest pattern of evolution in which certain groups died off and others became stronger through survival.

Of particular significance to the scientists was the once super continent of Gondwanaland, probably made up of what is now Australia, Antarctica, India, Africa, South America and perhaps parts of East Asia.

Studies of rocks found in Australia and dating back to the Cambrian period “demonstrate that Australia rotated counter- clockwise during this time. Other parts of the Gondwanaland super continent must have been involved in this ... rotation,” the report in Science said.

In fact, the scientists say, “We speculate that the entire lithosphere (the solid outer part of the Earth) may have been involved in this rotation.”

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Intelligent Design (Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, 020400)

Using their expertise, some scholars and scientists are challenging the theory of evolution and winning converts

If Charles Darwin is turning over in his grave he can blame the Intelligent Design movement. In the last decade or so the theory of naturalistic evolution has been in for a very rough ride, thanks to Intelligent Design theorists such as Phil Johnson, Michael Behe, and William A. Dembski. The success of the Intelligent Design movement is best illustrated by two opposing realities: (a) some leading evolutionists have gone on record to compliment Johnson and company, and (b) the evolution establishment is in a panic.

Other Amazing Design Work

* Your bone marrow produces more than 2,000,000 blood cells every second.

* If all your blood vessels were stretched in one straight line, they would cross Canada twenty times.

* Your brain has approximately 12 billion cells and they form 120 trillion interconnections.

* The cochlea of your inner ear has 20 million hair-like nerve cells that handle sound vibrations.

There are several key reasons why the Intelligent Design movement has made such a significant impact. Of first importance, Phil Johnson, author of Darwin on Trial and The Wedge of Truth, has done an impressive job of exposing the philosophical assumptions behind alleged scientific theories about life’s origins and development. Johnson has driven home the point that evolutionists often defend Darwinism because they have a prior religious-like commitment to atheistic naturalism.

Some evolutionists have readily admitted their bias. Richard Lewontin, writing in The New York Review of Books, said that “we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the Door.” Michael Ruse, a professor at the University of Guelph, angered fellow evolutionists when he admitted at a major science conference that some philosophical assumptions underlie commitments to Darwinism. Science is not as pure as we sometimes think.

Second, Intelligent Design scholars and scientists have made an impact because they have done excellent work in science, logic, mathematics and philosophy. Jonathan Wells, for example, has provided great criticism of standard Darwinian proofs in his Icons of Evolution. Michael Behe shows in Darwin’s Black Box how the complexities of biochemistry make Darwin’s theory of natural selection very difficult to accept. Behe, a Roman Catholic, argues that many of the processes at the molecular level are so integrated that no amount of time-plus-chance would allow such mechanisms to evolve.

Myths and Facts

Myth: Darwin repented of evolution on his death bed.

Fact: Darwin was in great pain near his death, he expressed his love for his family, and gave no comments about evolution.

Myth: What we believe about Adam and Eve is unimportant.

Fact: Our views about Adam and Eve relate to very crucial issues about human origin, the proper interpretation of the Bible, and the nature of the human race.

Myth: Science is abandoning the theory of evolution.

Fact: The scientific establishment still favours the theory of evolution and has won legal battles against creationists and public relations wars with Intelligent Design thinkers.

Myth: All evolutionists are atheists.

Fact: C.S. Lewis believed that God used evolution as his creative mode. Many Christian scientists believe in theistic evolution, including Denis Lamoureux, a Canadian who has doctorates in both theology and science. Denis calls himself a “signs and wonders evolutionary biologist.”

Myth: No educated person would believe the Earth is a recent creation.

Fact: John Baumgarder has a Ph.D. in geophysics from UCLA and is one of the world¹s leading experts on the design of computer models for geophysical convection. He works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He is a young-Earth creationist.

The same point is made at the level of astrophysics by astronomer Hugh Ross. He argues that the universe is so finely tuned that it is inconceivable that chance is involved. In other words, the architectural plans to run a universe capable of sustaining life have to be astoundingly sophisticated. Like pizza, the Earth’s crust needs to be just right. The gravitational pull of the moon can’t be overdone. As in surgery, the flow of oxygen has to be accurate. And we have to watch out how often we let our supernovae erupt. It is no wonder that God asks us, as He asked Job: “Where were you when I made the stars?”

My personal view is that God made our bodies, our planet, our galaxy, and the universe so complex that it boggles the mind to suggest that it all “just happened.” David Menton, a biomedical researcher in Missouri, uses an example from Scrabble to illustrate how hard it is for mindless chance to do much of anything. Take the phrase “the theory of evolution” and imagine trying to draw at random the 23 letters and spaces that would then form the phrase. With 26 alphabet letters and one space block, your chances are approximately once in eight hundred, million, trillion, trillion draws. Good luck.

Third, Intelligent Design advocates have made an impact because they have figured out which issues are primary and which are secondary. Johnson saw from the outset of his dogged pursuit that the crucial issue in the creation-evolution battle is whether or not atheism gets to rule the day in science. If it does, the gospel will suffer, he believes, and so will science. Johnson has little patience with theistic evolutionists because he believes that they miss the atheistic thrust of Darwinism.

Johnson decided not to focus on the age of the universe, the extent of Noah’s flood, and the precise details of Genesis 1-3. It is not that these issues are insignificant. He simply does not believe that they are primary. A turning point for the Intelligent Design movement came when Henry Morris, the champion of the modern creationist movement, gave his blessing to Johnson’s work. Morris still cares passionately about the age of the Earth, the Ark, and Adam’s historicity, and rightly so. But he knows that he and Johnson are on the same side... the side that states: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

James A. Beverley is professor of theology and ethics at Tyndale Seminary in Toronto. His web site is www.religionwatch.ca

Resource Guide

Defenders of Intelligent Design

Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (Simon & Schuster: 1996)

William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design (InterVarsity: 1999)

William A. Dembski, ed., Mere Creation (InterVarsity: 1998)

Phil Johnson, Darwin on Trial (InterVarsity, 2nd edition: 1993)

Jonathan Wells, Icon of Evolution (Regnery Gateway: 2001)

Critics of Intelligent Design

Theistic Critics

Denis O. Lamoureux in Darwinism Defeated? (Regent College: 1999)

Martin Gardner, Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? (Norton: 2000)

Howard Van Till and others in Portraits of Creation (Eerdmans: 1990)

Atheist Critics

Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (Norton: 1986)

Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (Simon & Schuster: 1995)

Stephen Jay Gould, “Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge,” Scientific American (July 1992)

Other Important Books

J.P. Moreland & John Mark Reynolds, eds. Three Views on Creation and Evolution (Zondervan: 1999)

Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists (University of California Press: 1992)

Important Web Sites

A Weekly Update on Intelligent Design from Phil Johnson Web site: http://www.arn.org/johnson/wedge.htm

The Discovery Institute’s Science Program (Pro-Intelligent Design) Web site: http://www.discovery.org/crsc/

Institute for Creation Research (Primarily Young Earth Creationists) Web site: http://www.icr.org/

The Web Page of Christian Astronomer Hugh Ross Web site: http://www.reasons.org/

Access Research Network Web site: http://www.arn.org/arn2.htm

Creationism Connection (Extensive data and hundreds of links). Web site:

http://members.aol.com/dwr51055/Creation.html

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When Darwinists go too far (National Post, 020827)

Andy Lamey

Can evolution explain not only how our bodies evolved the way they did, but why we behave the way we do? The rising school of thought known as evolutionary psychology answers with a resounding yes. In The Moral Animal, for example, a popular treatment of the subject, author Robert Wright states: “If the theory of natural selection is correct, then essentially everything about the human mind should be intelligible in these terms. The basic ways we feel about each other, the basic kinds of things we think about each other and say to each other are with us today by virtue of their past contribution to genetic fitness.” Similarly, U.S. evolutionary psychologists Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer make the sweeping claim that, “When one is considering any feature of living things, whether evolution applies is never a question. The only legitimate question is how to apply evolutionary principles. This is the case for all human behaviours — even for such by-products as cosmetic surgery, the content of movies [and] fashion trends.”

It’s easy to see why some people would be attracted to this view. In recent decades, it’s become increasingly fashionable to downplay the power of nature and highlight culture’s influence on us. According to some feminists, for example, sex roles are “culturally constructed” — the result of social forces rather than the expression of any inherent human nature. Evolutionary psychologists rightly criticize this extreme view. But you don’t need to be a radical feminist to be skeptical about evolutionary psychology, which advances its own distorting picture of human identity.

A crucial concept in Darwinism is the notion of “adaptation.” An adaptation is a quality that evolution has hardwired into us because it bolstered our ancestors’ chances of survival and reproduction when human physiology was being shaped by natural selection. Someone foraging for food in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago would have a likelier chance of success if they had eyesight, so people with good vision would be more likely to survive and reproduce than people without sight.

So far, so good. But when adaptation is extended beyond biology and applied to “all human behaviours,” it runs into big problems.

The first is that adaptive functions turn up in highly implausible places. Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, for example, characterizes reading fiction as an aid to evolutionary survival: “Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them. What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married my mother?”

The funny thing about fictional narratives, however, is that they can be appealing even when they describes scenarios no one could ever encounter. If I enjoy Harry Potter, it’s not necessarily because I fear I’ll wind up at witch school. I could just enjoy the story. But enjoying a thing for its own sake is precisely what evolutionary psychology denies. As critic Jerry Fodor writes, there are “lots of things that we care about simply for themselves. Reductionism about this plurality of goals, when not Philistine or cheaply cynical, often sounds simply funny.”

A bigger problem is evolutionary psychology’s dodginess on a key distinction in evolutionary theory, between adaptations and other products of evolution — which didn’t help our ancestors survive. As Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “Direct adaptation is only one mode of evolutionary origin. After all, I also have nipples not because I need them, but because women do, and all humans share the same basic pathways of embryological development.” Male nipples are but one example of the many “by-products” of biological evolution.

Such by-products also occur in the realm of behaviour — with a twist. The brain, Gould notes, “reached its current size and conformation tens of thousands of years” before anyone invented reading, so such practices arose not because they advanced survival or reproduction, but rather because human beings “co-opted” a genuine evolutionary adaptation (our brain structure) for a new purpose. And recognizing our capacity for “co-opting” nature — which Gould thinks underlies most behaviours — means not everything we do can be explained through a “past contribution to genetic fitness” after all.

In response, evolutionary psychologists argue “by-product behaviours” can still be understood as essentially “evolutionary” in origin. Such activities are not so much our active “co-optings,” they argue, as “side effects” of adaptations, and thus still owe their existence primarily to natural selection. By this loose standard, almost anything — adoption, bestiality, masturbation, celibacy — can be portrayed as a by-product of some evolutionary adaptation: Child-rearing gives rise to adoption, fierce sexual desire leads to bestiality and masturbation, while celibacy stems from religious belief (which is itself a by-product of evolution in some mysterious way). But as University of Chicago scientist Jerry Coyne notes, “the interesting thing about masturbation, adoption, bestiality, and celibacy is that they are maladaptive traits: They could never have been favoured by natural selection because their practice reduces the chance of propagating one’s genes.” The “side effect” argument, in short, makes Darwinism so elastic that both adaptation and its opposite meet the same non-existent standard of proof. Lacking any equivalent to the fossil record evolutionary biology works from, evolutionary psychology ultimately stops appealling to evidence altogether. A theory that doesn’t work from evidence isn’t science, but a form of dogmatic faith.

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Beyond the Horizon: Thinking about how we got here (National Review Online, 020926)

Recent reports from the world of science offer a nice break from the daily contemplation of desert wars, bus bombings, executive-suite scams, and Janet Reno’s accelerating slide toward political oblivion. There are, we often forget, much greater subjects to consider — such as how things came to be.

From California comes word that prevailing scientific assumptions about the true nature of the universe appear to be “logically flawed.” Explains one news account: “An ever-more-rapidly expanding universe is destined to repeat itself, says Leonard Susskind of Stanford University, California, and his colleagues. But the chances that such re-runs would produce worlds like ours are infinitesimal…The incomprehensibility of our situation even drives Susskind’s team to ponder whether an ‘unknown agent intervened in the evolution [of the universe] for reasons of its own.’”

A miracle of god, the correspondent says, may have set the stage on which Dubya, Saddam, Janet, etc. now perform their antic dance — though the writer quickly cautions that “even a god such as this can’t explain how things got so strange.” One might wonder on what grounds our correspondent assumes knowledge of what god can or cannot explain, or for that matter if the universe is strange at all.

But that’s to quibble. Assumed knowledge of Divine Ability and Intent is hardly rare in our tragic species; such assumptions are at least partly to blame for the spectacular horrors of the past year and the desert war to come. More to the point, at times like these it is nice to consider how the ball got rolling rather than where it seems likely to go.

Meanwhile the Washington Post reports on a phenomenon dear to many hearts: How humans developed the ability to speak. This unfortunate development (as it sometimes seems) may be the result of two “critical mutations” that swept through the human race about 200,000 years ago, says the paper, quoting a study soon to be published in the journal Nature. A “mounting body of research suggests that the mutant gene conferred on human ancestors a finer degree of control over muscles of the mouth and throat, possibly giving those ancestors a rich new palette of sounds that could serve as the foundation of language.”

It may be somewhat unsettling to some humans, especially members of the chattering classes, to contemplate the possibility that their highly valued talents are the result of a mere bit of genetic mutation. It may be generally assumed that the words humans think with and live by are the product of forces much grander than the development of muscle control in the cabbage-chomping apparatus.

On further reflection, however, this explanation is not entirely impossible to believe; some days it seems to hit the nail squarely on the head. If this theory be true, a blind accident of nature has allowed humans (said to have originated in similar circumstances) to chatter about a universe formed by intent. Could such a development occur outside intent, or is there a method in these mutations? There’s a great deal of chatter on both sides of that question — and not nearly enough space left for the definitive answer.

I’m put more in mind of a conversation between J. R. R. Tolkien and T.S. Eliot about the nature of language (a conversation included in a book by Humphrey Carpenter).

“You call a tree a tree,” said Tolkien to Eliot, “and you think nothing more of the word. But it was not a ‘tree’ until someone gave it that name. You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth. We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God.”

It was Tolkien, adds Carpenter, who played a central part in steering Lewis back to his youthful faith, though Lewis was not immediately overwhelmed by the man or his message. He described Tolkien in his diary as “a smooth, pale, fluent little chap” who was a bit of a whelp. “No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.” Both men, of course, did well by words. A recent item on Forbes.com ranked Tolkien richer than Frank Sinatra and Jerry Garcia among dead celebrities.

And so it is pleasant enough to entertain the possibility that both these gents are chattering away far beyond our horizon. But these days we are drawn back to reality, so-called, by a well-worn word. Whatever its origins, we know its meaning all too well. That word of course is “war.”

— Dave Shiflett is coauthor of Christianity on Trial.

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Inherited Debate: Ohio classrooms get a second opinion on evolution (National Review Online, 021018)

By Pamela R. Winnick

COLUMBUS, OHIO — In what could turn out to be a stunning victory for opponents of evolution, the Ohio Department of Education voted 17-0 on Tuesday to pass a “resolution of intent” to adopt science standards that would allow students to “investigate and critically analyze” Darwin’s theory of evolution. With additional hearings scheduled for November and a final vote to be held in December, Ohio is likely to become the latest battleground in the never-ending debate over how life began.

“The key words are ‘critically analyze,’” said Stephen Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based organization that promotes alternative theories to evolution.

“The new language is a clear victory for students, parents, and scientists in Ohio who have been calling for a ‘teach the controversy’ approach to evolution,’” he added.

Meyers said, “The board should be commended for insisting that Ohio students learn about scientific criticisms of evolutionary theory as a part of a good science education. Such a policy represents science education at its very best, and it promotes the academic freedom of students and teachers who want to explore the full range of scientific views over evolution.”

“Darwin’s dike is finally breaking down,” he said.

The vote drew ire as well as praise, however.

“It’s clear that the motivation is anti-evolutionist,” said Eugenie Scott, director of the Oakland, Calif.-based National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that monitors school districts that run afoul of the “evolution only” approach to science education. And Patricia Princehouse, a history professor at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, warned: “The American Civil Liberties Union will find it unconstitutional.”

In recent years, a handful of renegade scientists and academics have launched a revolt against Darwinism. Unlike creationists, they accept that the Earth is four billion years old and that species undergo some change over time. What they don’t accept is macroevolution, or the transition from one species to the next — as in ape to man. Scientists in the “intelligent design” community don’t advocate any particular religion, but they do believe that some higher intelligence — though not necessarily the God of the Bible — created life in all its forms. Proponents of intelligent design agree with the scientific establishment that students should be taught evolution, but they think students should be made aware there is some controversy over the theory.

Ohio is hardly alone in its “teach the controversy” approach. Last month, Cobb County, located in the suburbs of Atlanta, stunned the scientific community by allowing (though not requiring) teachers to present “disputed views” about evolution. Though the federal government has no authority over science education, the conference report accompanying this year’s No Child Left Behind Act notes that, “where topics are taught that may generate controversy (such as biological evolution), the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist, why such topics may generate controversy, and how scientific discoveries can profoundly affect society.”

The language adopted by the Ohio board falls short of that pushed by three anti-evolutionist members, who last week circulated an amendment that was more forthright about allowing students to be exposed to theories that contradict Darwin’s theory of evolution — including the theory of “intelligent design.” But what the adopted language does do, according to board member Mike Cochran, is to “allow students to understand that there are dissenting views within the scientific community” regarding evolution.

“The earlier language was more clear cut,” concedes Deborah Owens Fink, a board member from Richfield and one of three on the board who support intelligent design, “but this language gives some leeway” about how evolution is taught.

Those in the scientific mainstream say there is no genuine dispute over evolution — at least not within scientific circles. They cite such phenomena as antibiotic-resistant bacteria as proof that species change in response to environmental stressors, with nature weeding out the weak and favoring the strong. They hold that students in public schools should be taught evolution — and evolution only — and that religious views on such matters should be restricted to the home and the church.

But the public disagrees.

According to a June poll conducted by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, 82% of Ohioans said they believed teachings on the origins of life should not be restricted to evolution. The board received 20,000 letters urging that multiple theories be taught and, in a packed room on the day of the vote, the overwhelming majority of public speakers urged the board to be open to theories that challenge Darwinian evolution.

Ohio’s numbers mirror the national consensus. A recent Zogby poll showed that 71% of Americans supported the proposition that “biology teachers should teach Darwin’s theory of evolution, but also the scientific evidence against it.” Nationally, 160 scientists recently signed a statement calling for “careful examination” of Darwin’s theory.

While the public may be clamoring for open-mindedness about evolution, scientists argue that public opinion has no place in science education. They compare intelligent design to such “fringe” crazes as astrology, noting that intelligent design has never been presented in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

“Science is not democracy,” said professor Lawrence Lerner, professor emeritus at California State University and author of a 2000 report from the Fordham Foundation which showed that 19 of this country’s states were remiss in how they taught evolution.

“Science is not a viewpoint,” said Eugenie Scott. “There’s an objective reality about science. If the Discovery Institute is really interested in convincing scientists that their reality is false, then they would be attending scientific meetings rather than selling their ideas in the marketplace of political ideas.”

Most members of Ohio’s scientific community have argued for an “evolution-only” approach to science education. “Intelligent design is not based on scientific evidence,” said Lynn E. Elfner, director of the Ohio Academy of Science. And Steven A. Edinger, a physiology instructor at Ohio University, commented: “I’m concerned that they’ve opened a loophole to allow intelligent design in.”

Board members conceded that the vote was “political.” But, said Mike Cochran, “if it’s politics, this is in the best tradition of politics because it’s a compromise.”

Conspicuously absent from the debate was Republican Governor Bob Taft, who faces a close race this November against Democratic challenger Timothy F. Hagan. Though Taft has reportedly been working behind the scenes for a compromise, both sides have criticized him for refusing to take a public position.

Taft has reason to lay low. When the Kansas State Board of Education voted three years ago not to require public-school students to learn about Darwinian evolution or the Big Bang theory, Kansas became the laughingstock of the world. Newspapers as far away as South Africa mocked America for being backward and religiously fundamentalist, and editorialists at Kansas’s own newspapers worried that businesses would refuse to locate there because students were so “poorly educated.” In a much-publicized Republican primary that drew attention from such liberal groups as People for the American Way — which flew in Ed Asner to read from Inherit the Wind — three board members were voted out of office; and the newly elected “moderate” board last year voted to include both Darwinian evolution and the Big Bang in the Kansas science standards.

Whether Ohio will go the way of Kansas remains to be seen.

— Pamela R. Winnick, a lawyer admitted to practice in New York, has been a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade. A 2001 Phillips Foundation fellow, she is writing a book about the politics of evolution.

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Gliding dinosaurs are birds’ missing link (London Times, 030123)

by Mark Henderson

Fossils found in China of a winged and feathered dinosaur indicate that birds evolved from a line of tree-dwelling raptors

A SPECTACULAR set of fossils belonging to a winged and feathered dinosaur has been unearthed in China, providing one of the final missing links in the evolution of birds.

Microraptor gui, a new species that lived about 128 million years ago, used four feathered limbs to glide from tree to tree like a flying squirrel — a “halfway” means of flight by which the first birds probably took to the skies.

The small predator, which grew to about two and half feet long, will settle a long-running debate about how the cousins of Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor evolved into modern birds.

It is the first truly intermediate fossil that is part-dinosaur and part-bird. Its unique physical traits indicate that birds emerged from a line of small, tree-dwelling dinosaurs, which first learnt to glide as they hunted, or were being hunted, and progressed to flight.

This would rule out the theory that flight originated among ground-based feathered dinosaurs. Only last week, a study of modern partridges suggested a way in which such creatures might have learnt to take off, by flapping their forelimbs for thrust and traction.

Microraptor gui belongs to a group of theropod or predatory dinosaurs known as the basal dromaeosaurids, which most experts accept as the ancestors of birds. It had feathers arranged aerodynamically on its fore and hind limbs, and its long, streamlined tail.

This combination of wings and a tail would have been ideal for gliding, instead of running on the ground, where the leg feathers would have got in the way.

Xing Xu, of the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology in Beijing, who led the research team, said that the forelimb and leg feathers would have made a perfect aerofoil, similar to a bat’s stretched web of skin.

“These features together suggest that basal dromaeosaurids probably could glide, representing an intermediate stage between the flightless non-avian theropods and the volant (flying) avians.”

The research suggested that the new species first learnt to glide, “by taking advantage of gravity, before flapping flight was acquired”.

Six specimens of the creature, which is named after the distinguished Chinese palaeontologist Gu Zhiwei, have been discovered in Liaoning Province in northeastern China, and details are published today in the journal Nature.

Over the past five years, dozens of feathered dinosaur remains have been found in Liaoning, suggesting that theropod dinosaurs were the ancestors of birds — as was first suggested by Thomas Henry Huxley as early as 1868. Previous finds, however, have belonged to feathered but flightless creatures such as “fuzzy raptor”, one of the centrepieces of the “Dino-Birds” exhibition on display at the Natural History Museum in London.

Microraptor gui appears to confirm the work of the naturalist William Beebe, who in 1915 proposed that the first flying birds were gliders, equipped with wing feathers on both arms and legs.

Richard Prum, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Kansas, said that the new fossil “looks as if it could have glided straight out of Beebe’s notebooks. The discovery provides striking support for the arboreal-gliding hypothesis of the origin of bird flight.”

Microraptor gui and the other dinobirds of Liaoning lived between 128 million and 122 million years ago, making them much younger than Archaeopteryx, which at 147 million years is the most ancient bird known to science.

The discoveries carry huge evolutionary significance because Archaeopteryx is a close relation, and, though older, is likely to have developed from a feathered dromaeosaur similar to Microraptor.

“It looks confusing that this is later in time than Archaeopteryx , but that does not make this discovery any less stunning,” said Angela Milner, associate keeper of palaeontology at the Natural History Museum.

“It is just an accident of preservation.” The evidence now points overwhelmingly to a treetop origin for modern birds, Dr Milner said. “We are looking at small, agile dinosaurs with very curved claws, adapted for climbing trees,” she said. “It looks as if feathers evolved first for insulation.”

The evolutionary trail

Microraptor gui: 128-124 million years ago; c 2 ft long. Newly-discovered “missing link” between dinosaurs and birds that used four feathered limbs to glide from tree to tree.

Archaeopteryx: 147 million years ago. First known bird — toothed beak, feathered wings capable of powered flight. Probably evolved from creature similar to Microraptor gui.

Dromaeosaurs: Feathered dinosaurs living 130-120 million years ago. Mostly flightless predators; used feathers for insulation. Include Microraptor gui and “fuzzy raptor” fossil on display at Natural History Museum.

Sinornithosaurus millenii: 124 million years ago. Dromaeosaur covered in downy feathers. First complete skeleton of a feathered dinosaur discovered.

Protarchaeopteryx and Caudipteryx: 130-120 million years ago. Feathered, flightless dino-birds discovered in Liaoning province in 1997. Had fans of tail-feathers.

Archaeoraptor liaoningensis : Elaborate fake, announced in 1999 as the “missing link” between dinosaurs and birds. Turned out to be two fossils stuck together — the bottom half of a dromaeosaur, and the top half of a primitive bird, Yanornis martini.

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Scruffy little weed shows Darwin was right as evolution moves on (London Times, 030220)

By Anthony Browne, Environment Editor

IT STARTED with a biologist sitting on a grassy river bank in York, eating a sandwich. It ended in the discovery of a “scruffy little weed with no distinguishing features” that is the first new species to have been naturally created in Britain for more than 50 years.

The discovery of the York groundsel shows that species are created as well as made extinct, and that Charles Darwin was right and the Creationists are wrong. But the fragile existence of the species could soon be ended by the weedkillers of York City Council’s gardeners.

Richard Abbott, a plant evolutionary biologist from St Andrews University, has discovered “evolution in action” after noticing the lone, strange-looking and uncatalogued plant in wasteland next to the York railway station car park in 1979. He did not realise its significance and paid little attention. But in 1991 he returned to York, ate his sandwich and noticed that the plant had spread.

Yesterday, Dr Abbott published extensive research proving with DNA analysis that it is the first new species to have evolved naturally in Britain in the past 50 years.

“I’ve been a plant evolutionary biologist all my life, but you don’t think you’ll come across the origin of a new species in your lifetime. We’ve caught the species as it has originated — it is very satisfying,” he told the Times. “At a time in Earth’s history when animal and plant species are becoming extinct at an alarming rate, the discovery of the origin of a new plant species in Britain calls for a celebration.”

The creation of new species can takes thousands of years, making it too slow for science to detect. But the York groundsel is a natural hybrid between the common groundsel and the Oxford ragwort, which was introduced to Britain from Sicily 300 years ago. Hybrids are normally sterile, and cannot breed and die out.

But Dr Abbott’s research, published in the journal of the Botanical Society of the British Isles, shows that the York Groundsel is a genetic mutant that can breed, but not with any other species, including its parent species. It thus fits the scientific definition of a separate species.

“It is a very rare event — it is only known to have happened five times in the last hundred years” Dr Abbott said. It has happened twice before in the UK — the Spartina anglica was discovered in Southampton 100 years ago, and the Welsh groundsel, discovered in 1948.

The weed sets seed three months after germinating and has little yellow flowers. The species, which came into existance about 30 years ago, has been called Senecio eboracensis, after Eboracum, the Roman name for York. According to the research, it has now spread to spread to several sites around York, but only ever as a weed on disturbed ground.

However, more than 90 per cent of species that have lived subsequently become extinct, and its future is by no means certain.

“It is important for it to build up its numbers rapidly, or it could get rubbed out — which would be sad. The biggest threat to the new species is the weedkillers from the council,” Dr Abbott said.

However, he does not plan to start a planting programme to ensure his discovery lives on. “The next few years will be critical as to whether it becomes an established part of the British flora or a temporary curiosity. But we will let nature take its course,” he said.

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Refuting Darwinism, point by point (WorldNetDaily, 030111)

Author’s new book presents case against theory in just 83 pages

Editor’s note: In 1999, author James Perloff wrote the popular “Tornado in a Junkyard,” which summarizes much of the evidence against evolution and is considered one of the most understandable (while still scientifically accurate) books on the subject. Recently, WND talked with Perloff about his new book, “The Case Against Darwin.”

QUESTION: Your new book is just 83 pages – and the type is large. What gives?

ANSWER: This past March I got a call from Ohio. There has been a battle there to allow critical examination of evolutionary theory in public schools, and a gentleman wanted 40 copies of Tornado to give to state legislators and school board members. I was delighted to send him the books, but I also knew that a state legislator isn’t likely to pick up anything that’s 321 pages long.

Q: And not just state legislators.

A: Right. We live in an age when parents often don’t have time to read anything long, and their kids, who are usually more into video, may not have the inclination.

Q: So what’s the focus of this book?

A: I’ve divided it into three chapters. The first is called “Is Darwin’s Theory Relevant to Our Lives?” In other words, is the subject of this book worth my time or not? A lot of people think this is simply a science issue. And to some of them, science is booooring. But actually, it’s the teaching of Darwin’s theory as a “fact” that starts many young people doubting the existence of God. Once we stop believing in God, we discard his moral laws and start making up our own rules, which is basically why our society is in so much trouble. In short, Darwinism is very relevant – it’s much more than a science matter.

Q: You, yourself, were an atheist for many years, were you not, as a result of evolutionary teaching?

A: That’s right. I thought evolution had discredited the Bible. In my books, I give examples of notables who became atheists from being taught evolution, such as Stalin and Carnegie. In fact, the atheist Boy Scout who’s been in the news reportedly attributes his atheism to being taught evolution.

Q: Why do you think evolution has such a persuasively negative effect on faith?

A: First, it’s taught as “scientific fact.” When kids hear “scientific fact,” they think “truth.” Who wants to go against truth? Second, it’s the only viewpoint that’s taught. After the Supreme Court kicked God out of schools in the ‘60s, kids heard the evolutionist viewpoint exclusively. It’s like going to a courtroom – if you only heard the prosecutor’s summation, you would probably think the defendant guilty. But if you only heard the defendant’s attorney, you’d think “innocent.” The truth is, we need to hear both sides, and kids haven’t been getting it on the subject of origins.

Q: OK, then what?

A: The second chapter is “Evidence Against the Theory of Evolution.” Let’s face it, no matter what Darwinism’s social ramifications, that alone would not be a sufficient basis to criticize it, if it were scientifically proven true.

Q: In a nutshell – if that’s possible – what is the scientific evidence against Darwinism?

A: In the book, I focus on six areas of evidence. First, mutations – long claimed by evolutionists to be the building blocks of evolutionary change – are now known to remove information from the genetic code. They never create higher, more complex information – even in the rare cases of beneficial mutations, such as bacterial resistance to antibiotics. That has been laid out by Dr. Lee Spetner in his book “Not By Chance.”

Q: What else?

A: Second, cells are now known to be far too complex to have originated by some chance concurrence of chemicals, as Darwin hypothesized and is still being claimed. We detail that in the book. Third, the human body has systems, such as blood clotting and the immune system, that are, in the words of biochemist Michael Behe, “irreducibly complex,” meaning they cannot have evolved step-by-step. Behe articulated that in his book “Darwin’s Black Box.” And then there is the whole issue of transitional forms.

Q: What is a transitional form?

A: Darwin’s theory envisioned that single-celled ancestors evolved into invertebrates (creatures without a backbone), who evolved into fish, who evolved into amphibians, who evolved into reptiles, who evolved into mammals. Now, a transitional form would be a creature intermediate between these. There would have to be a great many for Darwin’s theory to be true.

Q: Are there?

A: There are three places to look for transitional forms. First, there’s the living world around us. We see that it is distinctly divided – you have invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles and mammals. But we don’t see transitionals between them. If these creatures ever existed, why did none survive? It is too easy to explain it away by saying they all became extinct. And of course, there is the question: Why aren’t these creatures evolving into each other today? Why aren’t invertebrates evolving into fish today? Why aren’t fish growing little legs and so forth?

Q: Where else would you look for a transitional form?

A: In the fossil record. And here we have a problem of almost comparable magnitude. We find no fossils showing how the invertebrates evolved, or demonstrating that they came from a common ancestor. That’s why you hear of the “Cambrian explosion.” And while there are billions of fossils of both invertebrates and fish, fossils linking them are missing. Of course, there are some transitional fossils cited by evolutionists. However, two points about that. First, there should be a lot more if Darwin’s theory is correct. Second, 99% of the biology of an organism is in its soft anatomy, which you cannot access in a fossil – this makes it easy to invest a fossil with a highly subjective opinion. The Piltdown Man and the recent Archaeoraptor are examples of how easy it is to be misled by preconceptions in this arena.

Q: What is the other place where you can look for transitional forms?

A: Microscopically, in the cell itself. Dr. Michael Denton, the Australian molecular biologist, examined these creatures on a molecular level and found no evidence whatsoever for the fish-amphibian-reptile-mammal sequence. He summarized his findings in his book “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis.”

The last chapter is “Re-evaluating Some Evidences Used to Support the Theory” of evolution. That would include evidences that have been discredited, and also some evidences presented as proof that in fact rest on assumptions.

Q: What evidences have been discredited?

A: Ernst Haeckel’s comparative embryo drawings. The human body being laden with “vestigial structures” from our animal past. Human blood and sea water having the same percentage of salt. Babies being born with “monkey tails.” These are not foundational evidences, but they still hold sway in the public mind.

Q: You mentioned assumptions as proofs.

A: Yes. Anatomical similarities between men and animals are said to prove common ancestry. But intelligent design also results in innumerable similarities, as in the case of two makes of automobile. Also, what has been called “microevolution” – minor adaptive changes within a type of animal – is extrapolated as evidence for “macroevolution” – the changing of one kind of animal into another. However, a species is normally endowed with a rich gene pool that permits a certain amount of variation and adaptation. Certainly, those things happen. But the change is ordinarily limited to the confines of the gene pool. It doesn’t mean a fish could adapt its way into being a human.

Q: You covered a lot of this ground in “Tornado in a Junkyard.” Can readers expect something new from “The Case Against Darwin”?

A: There is a bit of new material, but no, if you’ve read “Tornado,” or for that matter, if you read the July 2001 Whistleblower, where we looked at evolution, you already know most of the points. What’s new is the size. This is a book to give to a busy friend, a book for a high-school student to share with his science teacher.

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Courtly Combatant (World Magazine, 031213)

Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson has been in the lion’s den since 1991, when he horrified the “mandarins of science” by publicly challenging Darwinism. Now in his 60s and despite suffering the effects of a stroke, WORLD’s Daniel of the Year continues to befriend the lions even as he declaws them intellectually

John Perry

A TRIUMPHANT THEORY gathers lots of momentum in 144 years. Its gravitational field comes to include the most respected scientists, the most prestigious institutions, and the massive weight of popular opinion. Its true believers gain research grants and build their academic careers upon it. Its veracity goes unquestioned, its assumptions unchallenged.

But what if it’s wrong? What if it’s built not on a rock but on the shifting sands of conjecture, junk science, and political correctness?

In a perfect world, legitimate challenges to the theory would be welcomed. But in the public and professional world of Darwinian evolutionism, 144 years of received wisdom threaten the careers and reputations of all who oppose it. What quixotic and clueless renegade would dare to stand fast against Darwin’s irresistible force?

Enter a courtly, mild-mannered but confident law professor who makes no claims as a scientist but who knows a sloppy argument when he sees one. Enter Phillip Johnson, WORLD’s Daniel of the Year for 2003.

Our previous five Daniels—John Ashcroft, Franklin Graham, Ken Starr, Sudan’s Michael Yerko, and Christian teens who faced killers at Columbine High School and Wedgwood Baptist Church—did not go looking for trouble, but trouble came to them because they refused to bow to the idols of our time. So it has been with Phil Johnson, whose road to intellectual combat began innocently: Fifteen years ago, during a sabbatical from his endowed chair at the University of California, Berkeley, the law professor saw a book through the window of a London shop that caught his interest.

The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins, was a vigorous defense of Darwinian evolution. The more he read, the more Mr. Johnson believed that the arguments in support of random creation and natural selection were hollow and indefensible. Here was a fundamental scientific theory—invincible on the surface—built on suppositions and surviving in secret through inertia and intimidation.

Mr. Johnson answered in 1991 with a book of his own, Darwin on Trial. He made no effort to replace the evolutionary theory of Darwin with something else: His expertise is in assessing evidence. His only point was that the logic and argument that evolutionists from Darwin forward depended upon was insufficient to make their case. “The question I want to investigate,” he wrote in the first chapter, “is whether Darwinism is based upon a fair assessment of the scientific evidence, or whether it is another kind of fundamentalism.”

Over the next 150 pages or so Mr. Johnson systematically annihilated the Darwinist claims that evolution was a fact beyond question. Like a black belt in judo, he used his opponents’ own weight against them. Selective breeding as an explanation for evolving species? “The reason that dogs don’t become as big as elephants, much less change into elephants, is not that we just haven’t been breeding them long enough. Dogs do not have the genetic capacity for that degree of change.” Fossils as proof of Darwin’s theory? “If evolution means the gradual change of one kind of organism into another kind, the outstanding characteristic of the fossil record is the absence of evidence for evolution.”

Darwinians were apoplectic. William Provine, an evolutionary biologist at Cornell, thought the book was “worse than most of the garden-variety creationist tracts.” Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, writing in Scientific American, called Darwin on Trial “a very bad book ... full of errors, badly argued, based on false criteria, and abysmally written.”

The personal and professional attacks against Mr. Johnson continue to the present day, in part because he’s a Christian and therefore suspect. Like a lawyer, he relies on expert witnesses in preparing his case, but that doesn’t keep Darwinians from jumping on him because he’s not a scientist himself. Educators, science department chairs, and even some Christian professors and leaders condemn him. Mr. Johnson responds, “When you challenge one of those givens, of course you risk being identified as a loony and excluded from a respectable conversation. I’ve had to deal with some harsh words, but that’s the lot of anyone who takes a controversial position ... it’s a contact sport!”

Phil Johnson became used to contact at an early age: He entered Harvard at 17, was first in his law-school class at the University of Chicago, and clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. Now his base of operations is a Berkeley neighborhood 10 minutes from San Francisco Bay that—except for the later model cars parked at the curb—could be straight out of the 1940s. The quiet streets are lined with clapboard or stucco bungalows built so close together that there’s barely room for a driveway between them. Picture windows keep watch over a sidewalk broken here and there by the roots of old trees. Small porches are awash in potted flowers. Several chimneys still have old television aerials strapped to them with rusted metal bands.

Mr. Johnson answers the door in a long-sleeved blue-checked sport shirt open at the collar, khakis, and comfortable shoes. He doesn’t look like an iconic figure in the battle to challenge the international Darwinist juggernaut; he looks like a college professor with 36 years of teaching under his belt. Two characteristics set him apart from the average 60-something California bungalow dweller. First, his eyes, which fairly burn with the fire of new ideas and the passion to discuss them. Second, his wonderful and rich baritone voice, strong and articulate even at low volume, masterfully modulated and never raised above the level of normal conversation.

There’s no obvious evidence of the devastating right-brain stroke he suffered in the summer of 2001, just after his 61st birthday, but he begins a conversation with mention of it. “A right-brain stroke does not affect speech or language capacity, but it does affect the organization of things,” he explains, “even like telling you how to get to the house. That’s why Kathie [his wife of 22 years] gave you directions.”

And so, at an age and with medical experience that would lead many to retire, Mr. Johnson patiently explains for the nth time the central issue: “The assumed creative power of the Darwinian mechanism, natural selection, was never proved. In fact, the scientific evidence viewed without bias not only fails to support the claim that random mutation and natural selection can create marvels of intricate, organized complexity, the evidence actually tends to show that the mechanism has no such power. I say we must evaluate the evidence independently of any commitment to naturalism. This horrifies the mandarins of science” because they share a dark secret: “Evolutionary science has attempted to provide an alternative to the creation and has failed.”

The tiny changes evolutionists point to as proof of their theory, Mr. Johnson insists, are inconsequential. Natural selection may cause a population of moths to change color as their environment changes. But that in no way proves the same process could eventually turn a fish into a human being: “Natural selection has no creative power. It only produces trivial and temporary population shifts. Anyone who says natural selection can produce a plant or animal is making that statement on naked faith, regardless of what one thinks about the Bible.”

But once someone accepts the fact that random evolution couldn’t produce life on Earth, it has to have developed some other way. “I looked for the best place to start the search,” Mr. Johnson says, “and I found it in the prologue to the Gospel of John: ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ And I asked this question: Does scientific evidence tend to support this conclusion, or the contrary conclusion of the materialists that ‘in the beginning were the particles’?”

Mr. Johnson notes that “if we start with the Gospel’s basic explanation of the meaning of creation, we see that it is far better supported by scientific investigation than the contrary. At this point we haven’t proved the Bible’s claims about creation, but we’ve removed a powerful obstacle in the way of such belief. And all I really want to do with the scientific evidence is to clear away the obstacle that it presents to a belief that the creator is the God of the Bible.

“In my own development I first addressed the issue without reference to the Bible at all. I came to the conclusion that the scientific evidence just doesn’t support the central claims of the Darwinian theory. It tends to refute them. But then I thought if Darwinism is not true, what is? If you can’t do the creating without an Intelligent Designer, a creator, then there must be a creator.” In subsequent books including Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, Reason in the Balance, The Wedge of Truth, and The Right Questions, Mr. Johnson argued persuasively that a supernatural power or Intelligent Designer had to have guided the creation and development of life.

That, of course, is anathema to many scientists—and of all the questions scientists argue about, the issue of evolution versus creationism has also captured the public’s interest like none other. Darwin’s Origin of Species was the talk of Victorian drawing rooms in 1859. The Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925 brought the biggest crowd of telegraph operators in all of history to tiny Dayton, Tenn., to send daily dispatches of Bible-against-science testimony to newspapers around the globe. Today the question of how life began and progressed is still hotly debated in scientific circles, school textbook committees, and thousands of places in between.

Instead of fighting on, it would be easy for Phil Johnson to ease into a comfortable retirement—but he has a story to tell and a passion to tell it, and neither physical condition nor barbs from evolutionists are keeping him from the task. He has become the leader of a growing movement to expose Darwin and his followers as naked emperors whose presumptions wither in the light of unprejudiced inquiry. He keeps going for the joy of demolishing a bad argument, and because the answer to whether God created the world affects everything else.

“It’s a great error Christian leaders and intellectual leaders have made to think the origin of life just one of those things scientists and professors argue about,” Mr. Johnson says. “The fundamental question is whether God is real or imaginary. The entire way of thinking that underlies Darwinian evolution assumes that God is out of the picture as any kind of a real entity.” He points out that “it is a very short step from Darwinism in science to the kind of liberal theology we find in many of our seminaries that treats the resurrection as a faith event—something that didn’t happen but was imagined by the disciples—and assumes that morality is something human beings may change from time to time as it’s convenient to change it.”

Resistance from some Christians to Intelligent Design has been one of Mr. Johnson’s biggest surprises and greatest disappointments. He expected many scientists to attack him because their careers depend on Darwinism: “The more frustrating thing has been the Christian leaders and pastors, especially Christian college and seminary professors. The problem is not just convincing them that the theory is wrong, but that it makes a difference. What’s at stake isn’t just the first chapter of Genesis, but the whole Bible from beginning to end, and whether or not nature really is all there is.”

Taking Christian morality out of the culture is the logical consequence of the acceptance of Darwinism. That has led to no-fault divorce, legalized abortion, a pro-homosexuality agenda, and all the other tragedies of Darwinist moral relativism. If creation is random and purposeless, all truth is relative and God is rightly “relegated to the Never-never Land of Zeus and Santa Claus.” Mr. Johnson explains, “Once God is culturally determined to be imaginary, then God’s morality loses its foundation and withers away. It may stay standing for a historical moment without a foundation until the winds of change blow hard enough to knock it over, like [a cartoon character] staying suspended for an instant after he runs off the cliff. We’re at the end of that period now.”

In some ways it seems like Christians are continuing to lose ground in the public forum and, a lifetime after the Scopes trial, still haven’t been successful at establishing their position in the intellectual world—but maybe that’s because of the pridefulness of those who think themselves wise. Mr. Johnson says, “Sometimes a problem is simple rather than complex, and this is a simple problem. It has a simple answer that turns on one issue: Are Christians talking about something real or something imaginary?”

He continues, “When we speak of God, Jesus, the resurrection, are we speaking of things that really happened or the things that occur only in a mythical land called religious belief? If the God of the Bible really is our creator, cares about us and what we do, then our culture has made a terrible mistake in turning away from this God because we haven’t just changed a religious belief, we have repudiated reality.”

Phillip Johnson has made it his mission to correct that mistake and the wrong-headed thinking that led to it. He speaks all over the country, heads the Wedge (an organization dedicated to promoting the Intelligent Design theory), and produces a flurry of internet correspondence. He is also a Daniel who befriends the lions, treats them with courtliness, annihilates them on the intellectual battlefield, humbly yet effectively neutralizes their desperate ad hominem attacks, then invites them out to dinner—preferably Indian.

And he does not give up. At the end of an interview just before Thanksgiving, he volunteered that his next speaking engagement, an hour’s flight away in Los Angeles, would be his first trip since the stroke without his wife along. No doubt he would walk through the airport unrecognized, his sparkling eyes shaded by a rumpled and professorial hat. Then on to the auditorium, back into the lions’ den of his own accord where, smiling and without ever raising his voice, he would once more show that life is more than time plus chance, because in the beginning there was the Word.

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The Professor’s Paroxysm: A scholar’s attack on a student writer — and academic freedom (National Review Online, 040315)

Legal philosopher Brian Leiter of the University of Texas is a self-proclaimed disciple of Nietzsche who fiercely champions a Darwinian materialist vision of the world from his weblog, The Leiter Reports. Having a blog on which to hold forth about the rights and wrongs of the world without the benefit of an editor doesn’t make Leiter unique or particularly noteworthy, but one of his other sidelines does. Leiter is the author of The Philosophical Gourmet Report which ranks graduate philosophy programs “in the English-speaking world.” His rankings are respected and followed. Accordingly, Leiter is a powerful figure in the academy who is invited to speak by peers who may find him personally objectionable but too important to offend or ignore. The respect for his rankings has perhaps caused him to place a correspondingly high value on his opinion in other matters, which is the only explanation for the story I’m about to tell.

Writing for the January 2004 issue of the Harvard Law Review, student editor Lawrence VanDyke gave scholar Francis Beckwith’s book, Law, Darwinism, & Public Education, a positive review. The book makes constitutional arguments for the potential acceptability of including intelligent-design arguments in high-school science curricula. VanDyke found Beckwith’s arguments convincing and said so in his book note.

Such a sin could not go unpunished or unpublicized by those who hold to the inerrancy of the Darwinian scriptures. The Book of Scopes, 2:12-14 reads, “Thou shalt not admit that any explanation of origins outside the neo-Darwinian synthesis may have merit. Verily, thou must proclaim that any alternate explanation is of the same religious origin as witch burning and will be struck down by the Establishment Clause before ever being discussed in a public school.”

VanDyke’s temerity in giving prime real estate in one of America’s most respected legal publications to Beckwith’s work was particularly galling to Brian Leiter. Intelligent design? Francis Beckwith? In the Harvard Law Review? It was all too much for Leiter, which may be why he risked his prestige to make this petty, but deadly serious attack on VanDyke:

The author of this incompetent book note . . . is one Lawrence VanDyke, a student editor of the Review. Mr. VanDyke may yet have a fine career as a lawyer, but I trust he has no intention of entering law teaching: scholarly fraud is, I fear, an inauspicious beginning for an aspiring law teacher. And let none of the many law professors who are readers of this site be mistaken: Mr. VanDyke has perpetrated a scholarly fraud, one that may have political and pedagogical consequences (italics mine).

One doesn’t need to work very hard to read between the lines. Leiter seems to be threatening VanDyke’s career if he should dare to set foot in the academy. The tone of his post makes clear that he means this student editor of the Harvard Law Review harm. Leiter’s statement is the equivalent of an academic temper tantrum and is likely to backfire. The attack by a high-powered academic on an intellectually open law student is not the stuff of which great reputations are made. Leiter’s peers, some of whom may actually have believed all the hype about academic freedom, will probably wonder just how this sort of proposed blacklisting squares with long-cherished ideals.

Francis Beckwith, who has been the object of attacks by Leiter before, is shocked the University of Texas professor would respond to a student’s work so uncharitably. Beckwith expresses appreciation for Leiter’s scholarly work, but adds, “Leiter’s apparent intention to employ his own celebrity and academic stature to crush a young man’s spirit and his future job prospects in the legal academy, and to do so by means of blacklisting and mean-spirited McCarthyesque intimidation tactics, is absolutely unjustified.”

For his part, VanDyke is not backtracking. He defends the substance of his book note and charges that Leiter’s attack represents “an effort to make sure all students recognize that if they step outside the bounds of Leiter’s orthodoxy, their careers will be in serious jeopardy.” He adds, “This is pretty amazing considering my book note actually talks about the ‘hostility and censorship of the evolutionary establishment.’ If anything, Mr. Leiter acts as if it his goal to prove me correct.”

Unless he gets his temper under control, Brian Leiter won’t continue to have the influence in the academy he currently enjoys. Threatening the career of a young law student because he dared to differ is a sorry spectacle. Let’s hope a chastened Leiter will get a lesson in freedom of inquiry and expression from his fellows and then will be man enough to apologize to the promising student whose destruction he proposed.

— Hunter Baker is a freelance writer in Texas.

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Of Pandas & Men (Touchstone, 040500)

Roberto Rivera on Darwinism & Why We Let the Pandas Live

One hundred forty kilometers north of Chengdu in China’s Sichuan province lies the Wolong Nature Preserve, a 200,000-hectare area that contains approximately 10% of the world’s giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca). Wolong’s Giant Panda Research Center, which was the subject of a recent Discovery HD Theater documentary, Panda Nursery, has made important breakthroughs in the breeding and raising of the endangered species. Panda Nursery documented the first six months in the lives of two giant panda cubs. For the staff, especially the head of the breeding program, ensuring their survival was a 24-hours-a-day-seven-days-a-week task. The head of the program told viewers that he only saw his own two-year-old daughter two days a month.

Viewers learned everything they could possibly want to know about the creatures. For starters, after some debate, biologists have concluded that giant pandas are, in fact, bears, not, as previously thought, kin to raccoons. As for the distinctive markings, the most popular theory is that these conspicuous markings help the solitary creatures both avoid each other most of the year and spot a potential mate during breeding season.

The Real Reason

I have my own theory about the markings: They make the creatures so cute that people care about what happens to them. Because, let’s face it, evolutionarily speaking, giant pandas are losers.

Unlike their ursine cousins who will eat almost anything, giant pandas—as you probably know—basically eat one thing: bamboo stems and leaves. Okay, two things. (No one is sure why. It’s not for lack of options. Their home range supports other animals, such as the snow leopard, golden monkey, golden langur, and musk deer, none of whom share the giant panda’s “dietary restrictions.”) If that weren’t bad enough, bamboo ranks just ahead of cardboard and Styrofoam on the nutritional scale. To complete the nutritional trifecta, the giant panda is actually a carnivore with a carnivore’s digestive system. So, at best, it’s capable of extracting only 20% of the bamboo’s already meager nutritional value.

Then there’s the giant panda’s reproductive strategy. As one conservationist website put it, giant pandas are “notoriously unenthusiastic about breeding.” Anyone living in the Washington area is familiar with the difficulties the National Zoo has had in breeding the animals: a mating season that seems to last 34 minutes, males who are apparently clueless as to how females should be approached, and other problems that make panda pregnancies relatively rare.

And when female pandas do get pregnant, their bamboo diet leads to a very short gestational period and the smallest infants—as measured by their weight relative to their mother’s, a 1,000 to 1 ratio—of all placental mammals. If mom doesn’t accidentally roll over and crush the infant, there’s still the problem of neglect. Half of all panda births are twins. Almost invariably, the mother will choose one infant and completely neglect the other, resulting in its death. That’s why the Wolong Center had to develop what it calls “swap raising,” whereby the twins take turns being with their mother. It’s as if the species is implementing the recommendations of some prehistoric extinction consultant.

For those who take their Darwinism, as Thelonious Monk might have put it, straight, no chaser, the logical response to the plight of the giant panda is “tough.” Evolution is, if nothing else, unsentimental. It rewards adaptability and punishes, in the medium-to-long term, overspecialization. If your diet and habitat disappear—and that has happened countless times in Earth’s history—then you do, too.

Pointing out that people have reduced the giant panda’s habitat only begs the question, “Why should we care?” If man is, as the likes of Richard Dawkins tell us, just the giant panda’s “fellow animal,” our activity differs in degree, not in kind, and certainly not morally, from what countless other species have done to countless other species throughout history. The difference between modern man and the saber-toothed cats, who migrated from North to South America and wiped out the indigenous marsupial and avian predators several million years ago, is that we are a lot more efficient. While I am happy to defer to Phillip Johnson on the specifics of Darwinism, I’m fairly certain that being especially proficient at something is a positive in Darwinist thinking.

I’ve read many books and watched many hours of PBS and Discovery Channel programs on evolution, and the one thing that I haven’t heard is a hint that a species felt, or should have felt, regret or remorse about out-competing another species into extinction. Do you think that the American Bison feels bad that it is, among late-Pleistocene mega-fauna like the Columbian Mammoth and the giant ground sloth, the only survivor? Or that the first modern humans to enter Europe felt regret about the eventual demise of the “indigenous population,” a.k.a. the Neanderthals?

More to the point: I’ve never heard a modern paleontologist express regret about such previous extinctions. As we’ve been told over and over, extinction is natural.

Evolutionary Irony

Yet, no one finds anything noteworthy about the lengths to which humans are prepared to go to save the giant panda and other endangered species. In Panda Nursery, the willingness of the breeding program director to spend time away from his own child to care for the panda’s was depicted as a sign of his dedication.

What wasn’t noted was the irony that a member of the apex species would—forgive the way I’m putting this—sacrifice the care of its own young to care for the young of a species incapable of doing it on its own. Likewise, in purely evolutionary terms, the mark of out-competing another species is that, at the end of the day (pardon the cliché), you’re here and they’re not. Yet humans are not only willing to surrender habitat—i.e., create reserves—to help preserve another species, they’re convinced it’s the right thing to do.

And it is. It’s just not the Darwinian thing to do. Oh yeah, biologists treat biodiversity as an indispensable good of human existence, but it’s nothing of the kind. There are probably indispensable species out there, but apart from a few food plants, I’m hard-pressed to name any of them. (Contrary to what you’ve heard, the rain forests aren’t the “lungs” of the planet. As Bjorn Lomborg writes in The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, if all the plants on the planet died and decomposed, the process would consume less than 1% of the atmosphere’s oxygen.)

If anything, animals are even less indispensable to human existence than plants. As animal-rights activists never tire of telling us, we don’t need to eat animals to survive; soy, legumes, and grains can provide the necessary protein. We’ve technologically outgrown our need for animal labor, at least in the industrial world. What’s true of chicks, ducks, geese, and other things that scurry is especially true of the giant panda. If it and many other species were gone tomorrow, the material impact on human existence would be less than negligible; it would be nonexistent. Saving them from extinction has nothing to do with self-interest.

What it has to do with is the qualities that cause humans, alone among the millions of species on Earth, to ponder their obligations to other species. As Leon Kass pointed out in The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, our capacity to ponder that question proves that we are not just another species. Peter Singer, Matthew Scully, and, more recently, Jeffrey Moussaeiff, have all written, with ample justification, against the cruel treatment of animals.

What often goes unmentioned in the debate about animal rights is that only human beings could debate animal rights. Not just because of the uniqueness of human language but because the arguments and appeals in such a debate only resonate with humans. Pardon the rhetorical questions, but do lions care about the suffering of the zebra? Do Orcas, which often toss their prey back and forth like a beach ball before finally killing it, care about the feelings of seals?

Our relationship to the rest of creation is different, and we know this is true even if we don’t believe in the biblical God. Even if we consider Genesis to be a pious fairy tale, we still see ourselves as the protector of other animals, especially those that are having a hard time surviving. That’s as it should be. What’s not is insisting that man act as if he were special while, at the same time, insisting that’s he’s not.

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Intellectuals Who Doubt Darwin (American Spectator, 041124)

Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing

Edited by William A. Dembski

(ISI Books, 366 pages, $28; $18 paper)

WACO, Texas — At one time, the debate over Darwin’s theory existed as a cartoon in the modern imagination. Thanks to popular portrayals of the Scopes Trial, secularists regularly reviewed the happy image of Clarence Darrow goading William Jennings Bryan into agreeing to be examined as an expert witness on the Bible and then taking him apart on the stand. Because of the legal nature of the proceedings that made evolution such a permanent part of the tapestry of American pop culture, it is fitting that this same section of the tapestry began to unravel due to the sharp tugs of another prominent legal mind, Phillip Johnson.

The publication of his book, Darwin on Trial, now appears to have marked a new milestone in the debate over origins. Prior to Johnson’s book, the critics of evolution tended to occupy marginalized sectarian positions and focused largely on contrasting Darwin’s ideas with literalist readings of the Genesis account. Johnson’s work was different. Here we had a doubter of Darwin willing to come out of the closet, even though his credentials were solid gold establishment in nature. He had attended the finest schools, clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, taught law as a professor at highly ranked Berkeley, and authored widely-used texts on criminal law. Just as Darrow cross-examined the Bible and Bryan’s understanding of it, Johnson cross-examined Darwin and got noticed in the process. He spent much of the last decade debating the issue with various Darwinian bulldogs and holding up his end pretty well.

PHILLIP JOHNSON, AND a number of others, raised enough doubts about the dominant theory to cause a number of intellectuals to take a hard look, particularly at the gap between what can be proven and what is simply asserted to be true. Since that time, authors with more technical backgrounds, like mathematician/philosopher William Dembski and biochemist Michael Behe, have published books providing even more powerful critiques of the neo-Darwinian synthesis based on intelligent design theory. Behe’s work has been particularly disturbing to evolution advocates because he seems to have proven that organic machines at the molecular level are irreducibly complex and therefore could not have been the products of natural selection because there never would have been any intermediate working mechanism to select. Now, the two team up as Dembski edits and Behe contributes to a bracing collection of controversial writings titled Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing.

Dembski displays the intellectual doggedness of the group of contributors when he uses his introductory essay to ruthlessly track down and scrutinize the footnotes offered by those who would refute Behe’s case. Reference after reference claiming to have decisively defeated Behe turns out to be inadequate to the task. What passes for refutation is instead a collection of question-begging and “just-so stories.” Right away, Dembski sets the tone for the book. Nothing will be uncontested. The pro-evolution community will be made to fight for every inch of intellectual real estate without relying on the aura of prestige or the lack of competent critics to bolster their case.

The best way to read the book is by beginning at the end and perusing the profiles of the contributors. There, the reader will be able to select essays from representatives of a variety of disciplines, including mathematics, philosophy, biochemistry, biophysics, chemistry, genetics, law, and medicine. The most enjoyable in terms of sheer brio are the essays by Dembski, Behe, Frank Tipler, Cornelius Hunter, and David Berlinski. Tipler’s essay on the process of getting published in a peer-reviewed journal is particularly relevant and rewarding because it deals with one of the biggest strikes against Intelligent Design. ID theorists have had a notoriously difficult time getting their work published in professional journals. Tipler, a professor of mathematical physics at Tulane, crankily and enjoyably explains why.

TOP HONORS, HOWEVER, go to David Berlinski’s essay, “The Deniable Darwin,” which originally appeared in Commentary. The essay is rhetorically devastating. Berlinski is particularly strong in taking apart Richard Dawkins’ celebrated computer simulation of monkeys re-creating a Shakespearean sentence and thereby “proving” the ability of natural selection to generate complex information. The mathematician and logician skillfully points out that Dawkins rigged the game by including the very intelligence in his simulation he disavows as a cause of ordered biological complexity. It’s clear that Berlinski hits a sore spot when one reads the letters Commentary received in response to the article. Esteemed Darwinists like Dawkins and Daniel Dennett respond with a mixture of near-hysterical outrage and ridicule. Berlinski’s responses are also included. At no point does he seem the slightest bit cowed or overwhelmed by the personalities arrayed against him.

For the reader, the result is simply one of the most rewarding reading experiences available. Berlinski and his critics engage in a tremendous intellectual bloodletting, with Berlinski returning fire magnificently. In a particularly amusing segment, Berlinski, constantly accused of misperception, writes, “For reasons that are obscure to me, both [Mr. Gross] and Daniel Dennett carelessly assume that they are in a position to instruct me on a point of usage in German, my first language.” Though his foes repeatedly accuse Berlinski of being a “creationist,” the tag has little chance of sticking to a man arguing for little more than agnosticism on the question of origins and who disavows any religious principles aside from the possible exception of hoping to “have a good time all the time.” One suspects that the portion of the book occupied by the Berlinski essay and subsequent exchanges will gain wide currency.

For far too long, the apologists for Darwin have relied on a strategy of portraying challengers as simple-minded religious zealots. The publication of Uncommon Dissent and many more books like it, will severely undermine the success of such portrayals. During the past decade, it has become far too obvious that there are such things as intellectuals who doubt Darwin and that their ranks are growing. The dull repetition of polemical charges in place of open inquiry, debate, and exchange may continue, but with fewer and fewer honest souls ready to listen.

Hunter Baker is a Ph.D. student at Baylor University and contributes to the Reform Club.

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Mohler Speaks for Intelligent Design on MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country” (Christian Post, 041220)

Following the Dover area school district’s decision on October 18th to make alternative theories to evolution available to students, advocates for the inclusion of intelligent design, and arguments against the incorporation of such into the public school system have restlessly battled to protect the Biblical teachings and the truthful deliverance of education.

On December 14, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed suit against a school board in Dover County, Pennsylvania for its decision to include Intelligent Design, a theory which ascribes the origin of life to the works of God or a superintelligent being, alongside the theory of evolution.

According to the Baptist Press, Reverend Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary told the viewers of MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country,” that the theory of education has become an “intellectual pacifier” for the secular left in America.

Mohler commented, “ The American public has seen through the theories — that’s right, there are multiple theories, there’s not just one theory of evolution — and I think America’s parents are waking up and they are not going to rest until the schools do the right thing.”

David Silverman, communications director for American Atheists, CCM artist Natalie Grant, and Republican strategist Jack Burkman appeared as guests alongside Mohler during the commentary, which was hosted by Pat Buchanan.

Silverman argued that only Darwinian evolution theory can be substantiated by scientific fact and should be taught solely in public schools.

“The idea that Darwinistic evolution has happened is fact,” Silverman said. “The idea that the universe was created by an invisible magic man in the sky is fiction. It is mythology and it should not be taught. There is no way around it.”

Mohler, a Christian theologian and an opinion-leader of the largest Christian denomination in the US, asserted that evolution alone is inadequate and must be complemented with Intelligent Design.

“But the theory of Intelligent Design comes down to this: in the entire complexity of the universe as we know it — from something as complex as the human eye to the glory of the sky, all the cosmos, all of the planets and their proportion — there is more information necessary there than the theory of evolution can explain,” reported the BP.

“According to even evolutionary theory, the information has to be there. That theory can’t account for how the information gets there ahead of the mutation or the change.”

Grant, a mother and also a Christian, stated that the vast majority of Americans are Christians and they many parents wish for their children to receive a well-balanced education, which presents both Intelligent Design and Darwinian evolution theory.

“If my child has to sit in the classroom and be taught [evolution] as an option that is held in the world, why is it that my child cannot also sit in the classroom and be taught about Intelligent Design as a theory, as an option, so that a child can have a balanced education?”

Convergence of Theology and Science

Prior to the on-going struggle to dominate the American public education with different forms of theories regarding the origin of humanity, in 1981 the National Academy of Sciences declared, “Religion and science are separate and mutually exclusive realms of human thought.”

National Academy of Sciences, one of the most prestigious organizations that consists of prominent scientists of America today, signaled a possible shift in the paradigm of conflicting perspectives of two independent disciplines of knowledge.

The academy’s declaration, which compartmentalizes assertions from both religious and Darwinian advocates into a mutually separate setting, has recently emerged with a common ground on which notable scientists are seeing opportunities to reconcile a long-existed rupture.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science now sponsors a “Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion.” Science luminaries who in the ‘70s shrugged at faith as pseudo-science — including E. O. Wilson and the late Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan — have endorsed some form of reconciliatory convergence between science and religion.

Scientific thought of the 20th century in its earlier stages have embraced the pure materialistic view everything has a natural explanation has begun to gradually evolve to reconsider the notion that there is more to existence than what meets the eye in a new light of interests.

John Pokinghorne, a renown physicist and a Canon Theologian at England’s Liverpool Cathedral in heart asserted the following statement on the home page of National Secular Society, a UK organization founded in 1866 by Charles Bradlaugh:

“We should take science seriously but recognise that is has purchased its great success by the modesty of its ambition. An honest science does not claim to ask and answer every question. It limits itself to issues of process, the way in which things happen. Questions of meaning and purpose are set aside, though they too are meaningful and necessary to ask. A scientist, as a scientist, can only describe music as neural response to vibrations in the air. The mystery of music slips through the wider meshes of the scientific net.

An honest science recognises that its investigations centre on a limited kind of experience, the impersonal and so repeatable. This gives science the great weapon of experiment, but not all experience can be treated in this way. Personal encounter, the most significant aspect of human life, is intrinsically unique. We never hear a Beethoven quartet the same way twice, even if we play the same disc.

Everyone needs a wider world-view than science alone can give us - a move from physics to metaphysics. Even those who proclaim the self-sufficiency of science are making a metaphysical assertion, certainly going beyond science itself. A religious view is an alternative metaphysical position, based not on the ‘brute fact’ of the material world but on the ‘brute fact’ of the will of the divine Agent. Two brief points may be made about theistic belief.

The coming to be of persons seems to many to be the most significant event in cosmic history that we know about. The universe became aware of itself, and science became a possibility. This suggests to many that a personal God is a better foundation for understanding than impersonal nature.

Second, the fundamental religious question is the question of truth. Believers are not called to intellectual suicide through assent to an unquestionable authority, but they are called to seek motivated belief. What those motivations might be is a complex question that cannot be summarised in a paragraph, but they certainly exist and are worthy of serious intellectual consideration.”

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PBS station cancels intelligent-design film (WorldNetDaily, 050105)

TV outlet charged with practicing ‘politically correct censorship’

The PBS station in Albuquerque, N.M., has canceled a scheduled showing of a documentary on the theory of intelligent design, eliciting charges of “politically correct censorship.”

New Mexico teacher Phil Robinson says he worked with staff at KNME-TV to arrange for the documentary, “Unlocking the Mystery of Life,” to air on Friday night. Robinson discovered Monday that the show had been pulled and newspaper advertising for it had been canceled.

The station says the scheduling of the program was a mistake caused by a miscommunication related to the transition to a new program manager and that there was concern about the fact that those who funded the film have religious ties.

Seattle-based Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture hammered KNME for the cancellation.

“It is simply astounding that a public television station would engage in this sort of politically correct censorship,” said Rob Crowther, director of communications for the organization, in a statement. “Public television usually prides itself in exploring new ideas, not suppressing them. Doesn’t anyone at KNME believe in free speech?”

Joan Rebecchi is the marketing manager for KNME.

“It wasn’t suppose to be scheduled in the first place,” she told WND. “It was a scheduling mistake.

“We’re in transition between two program managers, and they were repeating ‘NOVA’ in that timeslot. … There was confusion over the show title, and so that show was scheduled in [NOVA’s] place. It was figured out last weekend that we had that scheduled and we weren’t suppose to schedule it.”

Rebecchi said Robinson contacted her about advertising for the show and that she helped him write a good ad for it, not realizing at the time the show was not suppose to have been scheduled.

“When I found out the show in fact wasn’t going to air, I pulled the ads from the Albuquerque Journal because I didn’t want him to lose any money,” Rebecchi said. “We were able to pull them before he lost any money.”

Rebecchi confirmed that a lot of Albuquerque residents are “very, very upset” that the station is not running it.

She said station personnel had concerns about the fact that those who funded the program “had some connection to a religious point of view.”

Continued Rebecchi: “Our underwriting guidelines don’t allow us to air programs that have a specific religious point of view,” adding that PBS has to be “kind of biased” against programming with any religious connections.

“That’s the reason they didn’t want to schedule it in the first place,” she told WND.

Crowther points out, however, that the film in question is currently for sale on PBS’ national website and has aired in almost every top-20 media market in the country, including PBS stations in California, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington state and Washington, D.C.

“The real losers here are New Mexico viewers who will be denied the chance to see a fascinating documentary that public television viewers in other states have already had the opportunity to see,” Crowther added. “I guess if New Mexico viewers want to learn more about intelligent design, they will have to go the national PBS website.”

“Unlocking the Mystery of Life” is a 58-minute program exploring what DNA reveals about the origin of life and documents how some scientists are skeptical about naturalistic explanations for the origin of genetic information and are looking to theories of design instead. According to the Discovery Institute, the documentary follows the development of intelligent design theory through interviews with key design scientists.

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ACLU backs off challenge to intelligent design (WorldNetDaily, 050107)

School district will inform students of alternative theories

The American Civil Liberties Union backed off on an attempt to stop a school district from making students aware of alternative theories to evolution, including intelligent design.

The new policy by the Dover Area School District in Pennsylvania — the first of its kind in the country — requires teachers to read students a one-minute statement at the beginning of class, explaining evolution is a theory that continues to be tested and that alternative theories, such as intelligent design, exist.

The ACLU, along with Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, filed a federal lawsuit in December arguing intelligent design theory is inherently religious.

Wednesday, the ACLU notified a federal judge in Pennsylvania that it will not go forward with a temporary restraining order to block the policy, which will go into effect Jan. 13 with the beginning of ninth-grade biology classes.

The ACLU made its decision after reviewing documents, board-meeting minutes and several depositions of board members and the superintendent.

The lawsuit will continue with a trial later this year, but the public-interest law firm defending the school says the ACLU’s unwillingness to procede with a temporary restraining order is telling.

“Right now, it’s clear the ACLU is re-evaluating the case and now looks at it as a more complex matter,” Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, told WorldNetDaily.

Teachers will still teach and test on the theory of evolution according to Pennsylvania Academic Standards, but students will now be told they can find out more information about intelligent design through a book available in the school library titled “Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins.”

The theory of intelligent design, endorsed by a growing number of credentialed scientists, says the best way to explain complex, information-rich structures observed by biologists is by the existence of a designer. Unlike creationism, however, intelligent design limits its scope to empirical observation and does not identify the designer.

The Pennsylvania school district is the first + in the country to require teachers to make students aware of the controversy surrounding evolution while specifically referring to the theory of intelligent design as an alternative.

The Dover school board voted 6-3 in October to adopt the new policy.

Thompson pointed out polls show a majority of Americans want to learn more about the scientific evidence for and against Darwin’s theory of evolution.

He also noted that the Dover school policy is consistent with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, in which Congress encouraged schools to present a full range of scientific views when teaching controversial topics, citing as an example the subject of biological evolution.

Earlier this week, the PBS station in Albuquerque, N.M., canceled a scheduled showing of a documentary on intelligent design, eliciting charges of “politically correct censorship.”

The station says there was concern about the fact that those who funded the film have religious ties.

Seattle-based Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture criticized the station for the cancellation.

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Only One-Third of Americans Say Evidence Has Supported Darwin’s Evolution Theory (Gallup, 041119)

Almost half of Americans believe God created humans 10,000 years ago

PRINCETON, NJ — Some 145 years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, controversy about the validity and implications of his theory still rages. Darwin personally encountered much resistance after his book was published in 1859. Seventy-nine years ago, the famous Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee brought the issue of exactly where human beings came from into sharp public focus in the United States. Indeed, as recently as this month, a court case in Cobb County, Ga., dealing with the treatment of evolution and creationism in school textbooks received nationwide publicity. November’s National Geographic Magazine asked on its cover: “Was Darwin Wrong?” and then proceeded to devote 33 pages to answering that question.

Darwin might be surprised to find such debate still raging nearly a century and a half after he published his book. He might also be surprised to find that even today there is significantly less than majority agreement from the American public that his theory of evolution is supported by the evidence.

Gallup has asked Americans twice in the last three years to respond to the following question about Darwin’s theory:

Just your opinion, do you think that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is – [ROTATED: a scientific theory that has been well-supported by evidence, (or) just one of many theories and one that has not been well-supported by evidence], or don’t you know enough about it to say?

	Supported by evidence	Not supported by evidence	Don’t know enough to say	No opinion
	%	%	%	%
2004 Nov 7-10	35	35	29	1

2001 Feb 19-21	35	39	25	1

Just a little more than a third of the American public is willing to agree with the “scientific theory well supported by evidence” alternative, while the same percentage chooses the “not well supported by evidence” alternative. Another 30% indicate that they don’t know enough about it to say or have no opinion. There has been essentially no significant change in the responses to this question since 2001.

What do we make of these responses? To be sure, most Americans are not scientists, and it’s probable that the last formal exposure to biology and evolution theory for many came decades ago in high school or college — if then. Confronted with this question asking for thoughts about a scientific theory, it’s perhaps surprising that even more did not choose the “don’t know enough to say” alternative.

Yet, this is not just any theory. It is one of the most basic theories in science today, and most biologists and other scientists believe that the theory is so well supported by data that it is a basic part of the scientific firmament. As National Geographic stated in its November cover story: “The evidence for evolution is overwhelming.”

Thus, it is of great interest to the scientific community to find that the public appears just as willing to say that the theory of evolution “has not been well supported by the evidence” as it is to say that it has been well supported.

Certainly, as noted, some of this skepticism about the scientific validity of Darwin’s theory comes from a lack of basic training or knowledge of science. But there’s more to views of the theory of evolution than just scientific knowledge. The highly controversial aspect of the theory — the one that caused such an uproar when Darwin first promulgated it almost a century and a half ago — was that it implied a contradiction with the story of man’s creation as told in the book of Genesis in the Bible.

Creationism

The recent Gallup Poll found strong presumptive evidence that this implication of the theory of evolution for the origin of mankind may be driving some of the lack of public belief in the theory.

The poll shows that almost half of the U.S. population believes that human beings did not evolve, but instead were created by God — as stated in the Bible — essentially in their current form about 10,000 years ago:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings — [ROTATE 1-3/3-1: 1) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, 2) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process, 3) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so]?

	Man developed, with God guiding	Man developed, but God had no part in process	God created man in present form	No opinion
	%	%	%	%
2004 Nov 7-10	38	13	45	4

2001 Feb 19-21	37	12	45	5
1999 Aug 24-26	40	9	47	4
1997 Nov 6-9	39	10	44	7
1993 Jun	35	11	47	7
1982	38	9	44	9

45% of Americans agree that God created man in his present form about 10,000 years ago. (This time frame was included in the question when it was originally framed in 1982 because it roughly approximates the timeline used by biblical literalists who study the genealogy as laid out in the first books of the Old Testament.)

About half of Americans agree with the two alternatives that are compatible with evolution — that human beings developed over millions of years either with or without God’s guidance in the process.

These views on the origin of man have essentially not changed over the last 22 years. Although there has been minor fluctuation in the percentages choosing each alternative across the six surveys in which the question has been included over the years since 1982, the basic patterns have remained remarkably constant. Indeed, the percentage of Americans who choose the “10,000 year” alternative has varied only within the narrow range of 44% to 47% across the six surveys (and two decades).

Biblical Literacy

Although 45% of Americans believe that humans were created by God pretty much in their present form at one time 10,000 years ago — a view that corresponds to the account of creation as presented in the Bible — only 34% of Americans believe that the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word:

Which of the following statements comes closest to describing your views about the Bible — the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word, the Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally, or the Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man]?

	Actual	Inspired	Fables	No opinion
	%	%	%	%
2004 Nov 7-10	34	48	15	3

2002 Dec 9-10	30	52	15	3
2001 Feb 19-21	27	49	20	4
1998 Jun 22-23	33	47	17	3
1993 Jun 18-21	35	48	14	3
1991 Nov 21-23	32	49	16	3
1984 Nov	40	41	12	7
1984 Sep	37	46	12	5
1983 May	37	43	11	9
1981 Dec 11-14	37	42	11	—
1980 Jul 29-Aug 2	40	45	10	6
1978 Apr 18-May 1	38	45	13	6
1976 Aug 24-27	38	45	13	5

48% of Americans believe that the Bible was inspired by God, although is not to be taken literally, while 15% say that the Bible is an ancient book of “fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man.”

Gallup has been measuring these attitudes using this question since 1976, and there has been little substantive change since. Indeed, the current views of the American public on the issue of biblical literacy are remarkably similar to what was recorded in August 1976, almost 30 years ago.

The discrepancy between the 45% who believe that man was created by God 10,000 years ago, and the 34% who believe the Bible is literally true suggests that there are some Americans whose belief in the “instant” creation of humans is not necessarily based on a literal interpretation of the Bible.

A segmentation of Americans based on their responses to the questions about creationism and biblical literacy finds that a quarter of Americans can be considered to be true literalists — believing not only in the literal interpretation of the Bible, but also in the creationist view of the origin of humans. Another one in five believe in the creationist explanation, but not in biblical literalism. 9% believe in biblical literalism but not creationism, while the largest group — 46% — neither believe in biblical literalism nor the creationist explanation for the origin of humans.

Belief in a Literal Bible and in Creationism
	% of Population	Characteristics
Biblical literalists and believe that humans were created in present form 10,000 years ago	25%	Women Age 30 and older No college degree Conservative Republicans Weekly church attendees Protestant
Believe that humans were created in present form 10,000 years ago, but not biblical literalists	20%	18- to 29-year-olds
Biblical literalists but do not believe humans were created in present form 10,000 years ago	9%	High school or less
Not biblical literalists and also do not believe that humans were created in present form 10,000 years ago	46%	Men East and West Coasts Urban College graduates Higher income Liberal Independents Seldom, never attend church Catholics

It is not surprising to find that the biblical literalists who believe that God created humans 10,000 years ago tend to be more religious and Protestant. Given the recent emphasis on the importance of religion in the Nov. 2 presidential election, it is of interest to note that this “true believer” group tends to be more Republican than the sample average. This group also skews toward those who do not have a college degree.

At the other extreme, the roughly half of Americans who tend to reject biblical literalism and creationism are much less likely to attend church, tend to have higher levels of formal education, and to be political independents.

The Demographics of Support for Darwin’s Theory of Evolution

Here is the breakout of support for Darwin’s theory (that is, those who say that it is a scientific theory well supported by the evidence) within subgroups:

Subgroup	% Who Believe that Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Is a Scientific Theory Well Supported by the Evidence
Postgraduate education	65%
Liberal	56
College graduate	52
West	47
Seldom, never attend church	46
Catholics	46
50- to 64-year-olds	44
Men	42
East	42
18- to 29-year-olds	41
Independent	40
Democrat	38
Moderate	36

SAMPLE AVERAGE	35

Nearly weekly church attendance	35
30- to 49-year-olds	34
Some college	32
Women	30
Republican	29
Midwest	29
Protestant	28
South	27
Conservative	26
Weekly church attendance	22
Age 65+	21
High school or less	20

The same basic patterns are found here as reviewed in reference to the creationist and literalism question. Belief that Darwin’s theory has been well supported by the evidence is strongest among those with the most education, liberals, those living in the West, those who seldom attend church, and among Catholics.

The lowest levels of belief that Darwin’s theory is supported by the scientific evidence is found among those with the least education, older Americans (many of whom say they are unsure about the theory in general), frequent church attendees, conservatives, Protestants, those living in the middle of the country, and Republicans.

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The ‘Monkey See, Monkey Do’ Approach to Science (Christian Post, 050118)

Last week, a federal judge ordered a Georgia school board in Atlanta to remove stickers from its high school biology textbooks that say evolution is “theory, not a fact.” The judge claimed the stickers are a violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

The stickers, which were put inside the books’ front covers, simply read: “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.” But U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper said the stickers denigrated evolution, thereby “endorsing the well-known prevailing alternative theory, creationism or variations thereof ....”

In Dover, Pennsylvania, 11 parents have joined the American Civil Liberties Union by filing suit in federal court to prevent the teaching of “intelligent design” in the high school’s biology classes. Intelligent design is essentially a theory that contends intelligent causes may have played a significant role in the origins of life.

According to a story in the Washington Post, Michael J. Behe, a biology professor at Lehigh University and a leading advocate of intelligent design, says the theory “might lead one to postulate the existence of a supernatural force such as God,” but it finds its starting point in science, not Scripture. Thus, Richard Thompson, of the Thomas More Law Center, which is providing legal representation for the school board says: “The school board has taken the measured step of making students aware that there are other viewpoints on the evolution of species.”

Few people understand that “Methodological Naturalism,” “scientific materialism,” or “Evolution Only” is the prevailing view of scientists that make up the National Academy of Sciences, which writes the National Science Education Standards. John Calvert, who has a degree in geology and currently focuses on constitutional issues relating to the teaching of origins in public schools, says a highly regarded poll published by Edward Larson and Larry Witham in the Journal Nature, reveals 93% of members of the National Academy doubt the existence of a “personal god,” versus 7% who professed a belief in God. In his remarks, made during Darwin, Design & Democracy v Science Converges on Design at the University of New Mexico, Calvert further explained:

“Methodological Naturalism [MN] holds that when scientists investigate and seek to explain the natural world they must irrefutably assume that Naturalism is true. We must assume that only natural causes have operated throughout the relevant history of life without the aid of any intelligent cause. Those who break this rule are not scientists and therefore are not qualified to speak or be heard. MN is sort of a rule that would require arson investigators to provide only natural explanations for all fires. If an investigator disagrees with the rule, he is not deemed a qualified investigator, so his reports cannot be considered. The result would be massive increases in insurance premiums and profound misunderstanding about the true causes of fire.”

Although what Calvert describes is essentially what science has become, it should be noted that modern science could never have arisen in our modern culture on such a premise. In other words, today’s science essentially claims all of life is random, irrational and illogical. To borrow from Calvert, the core claim of evolution is that “apparent design is just an illusion.” Such rejects the notion of absolutes, therefore, rejecting the very foundation of science. Consider carefully: if everything is irrational and illogical, if there are no absolutes, if there is no design, then results in experimentation are relative. Scientific claims cannot possibly be subject to refutation or falsification. A foundation of that order for science destroys its credibility.

No doubt this is why nearly all the great founding fathers of science (Kepler, Galileo, Pascal, Newton, Boyle, Brewster, Faraday, Linaeus, Ray, Maxwell, Pasteur, Kelvin, etc.) ascribed the origins of life and the laws of nature to a Creator. They believed working toward their discoveries was merely, as Kepler said, “Thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” Yet such great men of science would be rejected today — ridiculed as nonacademic stooges — because of their belief in the primeval special creation of God.

Moreover, it should be mentioned that most of America’s great founding fathers were theists and creationists. Creation is clearly implied in the Declaration of Independence with phrases such as “endowed by our Creator,” “created equal,” and “Nature’s God.” In The Evolutionary Outlook, historian Gilman Ostrander said: “The American nation had been founded by intellectuals who had accepted a worldview that was based upon biblical authority as well as Newtonian science. They had assumed God had created the earth and all life upon it at the time of creation and had continued without change thereafter.” Nevertheless, the Bible, Christianity, creationism, and “intelligent design” are not allowed today in the schools of the states, which were founded upon these very truths.

It is a travesty of justice — actually a violation of the public’s First Amendment rights — that any consideration of God or supernatural explanations of science are summarily banned from the public classroom. Calvert explains:

“The problem is that an ‘Evolution Only’ policy is not really scientific or constitutional. It is not scientific because it is officially biased rather than scientifically objective. Because it is biased, it is not religiously neutral. Evolution Only effectively requires our children to ‘know’ that we come from a natural rather than an intelligent cause, that we are occurrences and not designs, and that we naturally arise without purpose from a purposeless process. It effectively teaches that no rational evidentiary basis exists for theistic beliefs. Evolution Only converts these scientific claims into dogmas that are the fundamental tenants of non-theistic religions and that directly contradict the fundamental tenants of theistic religions. Accordingly, in my opinion, Evolution Only is not ‘secular’ or neutral. Rather it is an ideology that directly conflicts with the First Amendment rights of parents and students.”

Simply put, the scientific community and the public educational system have essentially embraced a — forgive the pun — “monkey see, monkey do” approach to science, which is justified by the court’s distortion of the First Amendment that establishes evolutionary humanism as the quasi-official religion of the public schools.

People in America today are deeply concerned about what they see to be a moral meltdown in our country. Many understand that the ethical implications of a purely naturalistic approach to science can be far-reaching. If life is simply an accident, what’s wrong with aborting children? Why not euthanize the aged and the handicapped? Why not end the institution of marriage? Why tell the truth? Why not steal or kill? As Fyodor Dostoevsy said: “If there is no God, all things are permissible.”

Perhaps the words of Francis Bacon are relevant: “A little science estranges a man from God; a little more brings him back.”

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Evolution is a Friend of Creation, says Evangelical Professor (Christian Post, 041231)

Richard Colling, a biologist/evangelical, is swinging a new voice in the creation/evolution debate this winter: Darwin’s theory of evolution is compatible and complementary to the theory of intelligent design.

Colling, who received a Ph.D in microbiology and chairs the biology department at Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbonnais, recorded his new symbiotic theory in his book, “Random Designer: Created from Chaos to Connect with Creator.”

According to the Associated Press, Colling’s central claim is “that both the origin of life from a primordial goo of nonliving chemicals, and the evolution of species according to the processes of random mutation and natural selection are fully compatible with the available scientific evidence and also contemporary religious beliefs.”

“Denying science makes us look stupid,” he was quoted as describing conservative Christians. “People should not feel they have to deny reality in order to experience their faith.”

Colling’s book comes nearly 80 years after the evolution/creation debate took center stage. During the infamous Scopes Monkey trial, a self-proclaimed atheist and a zealous evangelical preacher and leader battled in a “contest between evolution and Christianity…a duel to the death.”

Although the verdict was made in favor of the Christian conservative, the media’s representation of evangelicals as dull “country bumpkins” generally turned public opinion against the validity of creationism.

In recent years Christian conservatives turned to the “intelligent design” theory as a counterpart to evolution. Intelligent design opposes declares the complexity of the world could not have come into being by random mistakes of nature.

Colling’s theory asserts both evolution and intelligent design are true and complementary.

“It pains me to suggest that my religious brothers are telling falsehoods” when they say evolutionary theory is “in crisis” and claim that there is widespread skepticism about it among scientists. “Such statements are blatantly untrue,” he argues in his book. “Evolution has stood the test of time and considerable scrutiny.”

Meanwhile, he says he “believes in the biblical account of creation” and opposes “a godless interpretation of the evolutionary hypothesis.”

These two theories are harmonized in a separate theory called “random designer.” In that theory Collings says evolution is a process used by the designer to accomplish his goals.

‘What the designer designed is the random-design process,” or Darwinian evolution, Colling said. “God devised these natural laws, and uses evolution to accomplish his goals.”

Random Designer: Created from Chaos to Connect with Creator, published by Browning Press, can be purchased at your local bookstore.

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Happy New Year (David Warren, 041229)

So: are we evolving or not? The issue resurfaced this year with the discovery of “Homo floresiensis” — which is to say, the grapefruit-sized skull of some hobbit-sized being — in the limestone cave of Liang Bua on the Indonesian island of Flores. She lived perhaps 18,000 years ago. The Indonesian, Australian, American, and Dutch palaeontologists found other bones, too, of her contemporaries nearly as short, but the media flourish was over the “woman” only one metre high.

She has been assigned the name “Hominid LB-1”, but let’s call her “Flora”. By a series of inferences we gather that she was also comparatively long-armed, had thick eyebrow ridges, a sharply sloping forehead, almost no chin, and was around 30 years of age. She lived in her island world among pony-height elephants, rats the size of golden retrievers, and giant lizards (including the Komodo dragons that are still with us). Her people hunted and cooked the little elephants especially, judging from charred bones found on site, and the stone-hewn cutting, chopping, and perforating tools of their batterie de cuisine.

Very clever indeed: for in the geological time-frame we are discussing, they could only have arrived on the island by boat.

Unmistakably of the genus Homo, but the speciation is open to debate. Palaeontologists have lately been painting a museum diorama of our Homo-sapien ancestors, sharing a planet with Neanderthals and other eco-competitors who disappeared, probably because we did them in. But Homo floresiensis appears to have gone down below a major volcanic eruption on Flores about 12,000 years ago. Whereas the remains of all current hominids are to be found only above that ash level, so we probably never met.

On the other hand, it is a large, mountainous, densely-forested tropical island. And the present-day inhabitants have detailed legends about little metre-high people they call Ebu Gogo, who murmur among themselves, can parrot human language, and pilfer unattended crops. So maybe we have met, and might still meet, somewhere in the nearly impenetrable interior of the island. Whereupon we would most likely discover, that they are us.

Palaeontologists love to discover new hominid species: it means fame, and big money. So far, more than 50 have been named by them. The discoveries can also be used, as this latest has been in the media, to debunk the religious notion that humans are unique, and illustrate evolutionary hypotheses.

Yet I myself, wandering through the streets of Calcutta seven years ago, in the rain and early-morning darkness, encountered an indisputably adult human woman of about the same weight as Flora (25 kilos), and only slightly taller. She was also blind, and being led through the mire by a man whom I took to be her husband — himself, though much taller, implausibly diminutive. Malnutrition can do remarkable things to the human form. There is anyway great diversity in race and type: witness pygmies.

So when a palaeontologist tells us he has discovered a new hominid species, I am sceptical. There are a lot of palaeontologists and palaeoanthropologists: more, quite literally, than there are ancient humanid bones for them to gnaw upon. And as one of the more prominent and sensible of them, Dr. Maciej Henneberg of the University of Adelaide, has said after examining and graphing more than 200 such specimens — from Australopithecines forward — they all fall within the bell-curve of normal variation within a single species, over place and time.

In short: adaptation yes, Darwinism no.

As one of my scientific advisers explains (a certain Peter O’Donnell of Vancouver, B.C.), you have to put your faith in science case-by-case. In his view: “Gravitation looks okay, although the constant-G may have its flaws. Chemistry looks golden. Relativity seems a better framework than Newtonian dynamics, but one suspects a new overturning ahead. Evolution? Probably a pile of crap. It seems to spring from the same faulty thinking reservoir as Marxism and other failed ideological constructs of the early 20th century.”

Whereas God, creator of heaven and earth, is a single-case hypothesis, and of a different kind.

There was a huge volcanic explosion on Flores 12,000 years ago, killing who knows how many hominids of whatever description. And this Christmas, an earthquake undersea off Sumatra sent tidal waves racing across the Indian Ocean, drowning hundreds even on the distant coasts of Somalia — a poignant reminder that a world we did not make, is also beyond our control.

Our science could not yet predict the earthquake, let alone the waves. And nothing we can imagine could ever stop such an event, whose vibrations were felt around the earth, and which slightly wobbled its axis of rotation.

The evolutionary hypothesis is the chief source of the illusion that somehow we can gain control — and make God finally answerable to man, instead of vice versa. But in wishing you a Happy New Year, “Flora” and I would like to remind you that this will never work.

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More evolution (David Warren, 050105)

Besieged on every side for my unpopular opinions on political, social, and cultural events, flailed by outraged readers for my support of Bush, and the war in Iraq; for my opposition to gay marriage, and to “multiculturalism”; for my effronteries against political correctness — why would I want to open another front?

But this I did with last Wednesday’s column, wishing my readers a Happy New Year on behalf of myself and the recently discovered “Homo floresiensis”, while taking a wild, mischievous kick at people I called “evolutionists”. My inbox has loaded with some of the most entertaining and intelligent correspondence I have received in a long time. Oddly enough, the more patient and even sympathetic letters were from qualified science types, sincerely wondering what I meant by several of my assertions. Whereas the vituperation was (not for the first time) largely from people anxious to demonstrate that they know even less about the subject than I do. Though some of it was witty, and I laughed out loud.

It is a subject I hope to return to, now and then, for I think “evolution” is not a science but an ideology, a quasi-religion, a colossal scientistic put-on; that “evolutionary science” is a cant expression, a pretence unworthy of a scientific researcher. His job is to inquire, not to advance a worldview. The people who study the development of living organisms through the fossil record should be called, unpretentiously, “palaeobiologists”.

What I’m saying comes down to this. Science cannot now explain, and probably will never be able to explain, the origin of any species in nature — least of all man. It can assemble the succession of species in the fossil record; it can catalogue resemblances between species in space and time; it can begin to show the fine adaptations of each to its environment; and the workings of “natural selection” when the environment changes; it can even look into the mechanism by which heritable traits are passed along from individual to individual within a species (thanks, incidentally, to a line of intellectual descent not from Charles Darwin, but from an Augustinian monk named Gregor Mendel). But science cannot even tell you how a species is defined, let alone how life emerged from the lifeless sterility of the “primordial swamp”.

“Evolutionism” is the prevailing speculation, that by minute alterations in traits, in continuing response to environmental pressures, an isolated group within a species “evolves” to the point where its members can breed with each other but no longer with others, and — presto! — you have a new species. But the “presto” has never been observed in nature, and there is a universal paucity of transitional forms. The speculation may even seem plausible, but remains an act of faith. It isn’t science, because it isn’t falsifiable: there is no way to test if it might be wrong.

It flourishes because it gives comfort to its believers. It assures them that nature is random. In the words of the late Czeslaw Milosz, which I quoted a few months ago: “A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death — the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.” Evolution is the guarantee that nothing really matters.

My more intemperate readers accused me of buying into “Biblical creationism” . It does not follow from the fact I am intensely sceptical about “evolutionary science”, however, that I would be credulous about “creation science”. Both require a kind of po-faced cleverness, to talk a little faster than the phenomena can be presented, but the latter is based on premises that are even sillier than the former. The Bible is not a textbook in cosmology or biology, it is not about nature but about God. To my mind, “evolutionism” and “creationism” are competing “isms”. But they reduce finally to the same thing: an attempt to explain how something comes from nothing.

Now, this is a very large subject, and I write a very short column. Let me append a note of autobiography, to puzzle my expert readers further, before my next emergence from the cosmic void. It is true I am now a “religious nutjob”: which is to say, a believing Catholic Christian. But this was not always so: I was an atheist into my twenties. And curiously enough, it was before I ever became a Christian, that I became convinced, from out of my youthful fascination with biology and natural history, that Darwinian evolution is smoke and mirrors. And this, even though I had and retain the highest regard for Charles Darwin, up there with Aristotle and Linnaeus among the greatest natural historians.

I likewise retain huge respect for all toilers in the biological field. Their observations do not depend upon their theories. It is the same nature that is studied, regardless of one’s superstructure of belief, and every falsifiable observation about it is, indeed, true science.

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Debating Darwinism (Washington Times, 050505)

Starting today, the Kansas Board of Education will begin a six-day debate on the state’s science standards, specifically the teaching of Darwinian evolution. On one side there will be about two dozen skeptics of Darwinism and proponents of an alternative theory of evolution known as intelligent design. And on the other side there will be a trial lawyer, Pedro Irigonegaray, who has volunteered to defend Darwin.

If this seems one-sided, that’s because the Darwinian scientists have chosen to boycott the debate, which is surprising since Darwinian theory is still the accepted standard within the scientific community. Their reason for doing so, at least according to Mr. Irigonegaray, is that “[t]o debate evolution is similar to debating whether the earth is round. It is an absurd proposition.” But that’s not entirely fair. Nearly 400 scientists have signed a statement of dissent from Darwin’s theory. Moreover, Darwinian skeptics and ID theorists don’t question evolution, at least as it’s understood as species changing over time.

The fact is that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is not infallible. It hasn’t been since Darwin himself acknowledged that gaps in the fossil record could eventually undermine his theory of common descent. One of those gaps occurs right before the Cambrian Explosion — a biological “big bang” that happened about 530 million years ago. Scientists have been unable to uncover clear precursors to the huge amount of new species that arose from the explosion. Their failure has led many to wonder if all life forms indeed branched off from a common ancestor, as Darwin theorized.

Of course, to explain anomalies like the Cambrian Explosion requires a little imagination — hence the theory of intelligent design. Put simply, ID theory rejects the role that random mutations play in evolution. To account for evolutionary change, and as a way of making sense of life systems so complex that randomness couldn’t possibly account for it all, ID theorists prefer the notion that an “intelligent cause” guides change. It is on this point that ID theory departs so dramatically from Darwin.

It is also why Darwinists reject ID scientists as a bunch of creationists. Again, this is unfair — but also beyond the scope of the Kansas debate. The scientists joining the debate in Topeka aren’t necessarily interested in replacing Darwin with ID theory, and certainly not with the Biblical account of creation. For them, Darwin’s theory is so riddled with holes that to teach it to students unquestioningly is a disservice and inimical to the definition of science.

And it is just this legitimate scientific debate that Darwinists refuse to have. “The defense of Darwin’s theory ... has fallen into the hands of biologists who believe in suppressing criticism when possible and ignoring it when not,” wrote David Berlinski recently in the Wichita Eagle. Mr. Berlinski, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, is widely recognized as a leading Darwinian skeptic. He continues, “It is not a strategy calculated to induce confidence in the scientific method.” It also doesn’t help our students.

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Explosive memo reveals Darwinist strategy for Kansas (WorldNetDaily, 050506)

This week, the leading lights of the Intelligent Design movement – Drs. Jonathan Wells and Michael Behe among them – will make their way to Topeka, Kan. There, they will make an appeal to the state’s elected school board to allow in-class criticisms of Darwinism and its derivatives, which are now taught not as theory – not even as fact, actually – but as something close to dogma.

The ID advocates may very well succeed. The school board now has a 6-to-4 majority sympathetic to a rational challenge to Darwnism. What is more, in the six years since the evolution controversy first exploded in Kansas, the ID movement has done an impressive job refocusing the debate on science and logic and undoing the crude stereotypes under which all opponents of naturalism have had to labor since the Scopes trial.

The pro-Darwinian forces in Kansas, however, are not about to roll over. These forces have come together under the aegis of the not-for-profit Kansas Citizens For Science and have mounted a systematic and effective resistance since 1999 when the issue first surfaced. This year, in response to the leveling of the playing field, KCFS has opted for hardball.

On Feb. 10, in its typically hyperbolic style, KCFS posted on its website a series of attacks against the “the six-member anti-science majority” and the ID advocates and threatened a “staged re-enactment of the Scopes trial.”

Behind the scenes, the language was less tempered still. The KCFS discussion board lit up that day. And although most of the comments are not particularly relevant, those from the KCFS Secretary and Media Contact Liz Craig bear scrutiny.

My strategy at this point is the same as it was in 1999 ... notify the national and local media about what’s going on and portray [the school board majority] in the harshest light possible, as political opportunists, evangelical activists, ignoramuses, breakers of rules, unprincipled bullies, etc.

The “target” for Craig’s propaganda, as she freely admits, are “the moderates who are not particularly well educated about the issues.” In 1999, the KCFS strategy was to scare the uninformed into thinking that any official resistance to Darwin would cause the state great embarrassment. To assure the desired outcome, the KCFS then prodded the media to portray the state school board – and by extension its citizens – as evangelical activists, ignoramuses and the like.

Craig is openly boastful about her success in this regard. The uninformed – dressed up by Craig and the media as “moderates” – responded by voting out school board members from vulnerable districts, particularly the suburban districts where citizens were most concerned about what the rest of the world thought. The hostile media coverage had, in fact, caused these citizens great “embarrassment.”

Thomas Frank upped the embarrassment ante in his specious best-seller, “What’s The Matter With Kansas,” a book whose take on the “barking idiocies” of the school board and the “cranks, conspiracists and calamity howlers” who comprise the state’s citizenry almost perfectly mirrors Craig’s.

Despite Frank and the media, conservatives regained the majority on the school board in 2004. When first apprised of the school board’s intentions, KCFS spokespeople immediately contacted the Kansas City Star, and the Star obliged KCFS by publicly wringing its hands and fretting about new national humiliations to come. “Kansas science classes should not get sidetracked into issues that belong in religious education,” thundered the Star editorial, fully misunderstanding the issue.

“There may be no way to head off another science standards debacle,” adds Craig in her Feb. 10 posting, “but we can sure make them look like asses as they do what they do.”

“I believe the right game plan can make their lives in the spotlight a living hell,” responds KCFS member Robert Madison, a former high-school science teacher. “There is nothing wrong with doing what worked in 1999.”

“We’ve got national and international coverage for our issue,” answers an upbeat Craig. “London Guardian, Time, NPR, Newsweek, USA Today, National Review, Toronto newspaper, to name a few.”

Readers of those publications – and Frank’s book – might get a second opinion before believing that political opportunists, evangelical activists, ignoramuses, breakers of rules and unprincipled bullies are destroying the state of Kansas.

Truth is often the first casualty when paradigms shift.

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Survey: Protestants Back Intelligent Design (Christian Post, 050526)

Among American physicians, primary support for intelligent design (ID) comes from Protestants, according to the recent findings of a nation-wide research. Moreover, half of doctors surveyed believe that schools should be allowed, but not required, to teach ID.

“Sympathy for the idea of intelligent design comes primarily from Protestant members of the medical community, although openness to consideration of intelligent design as a legitimate speculation is strong among Catholics but completely lacking among Jews,” said Alan Mittleman, director of the Finkelstein Institute.

The study, co-conducted May 13-15 by HCD Research in Flemington, NJ. and the Louis Finkelstein Institute for Social and Religious Research in New York, NY. revealed fascinating findings drawn from the 1,472 physicians polled.

Some of the major findings are as follows:

What are your views on Evolution?

Majority of all doctors (78%) accept evolution rather than reject it and, of those, Jews are most positive (94%), Catholics are next (86%) followed by Protestants (59%).

What are your views on the origin and development of human beings?

Less than half (42%) agree with the statement that God initiated and guided an evolutionary process that has led to current human beings, while 18% believe that “God created humans exactly as they appear now” and 38% said they believe that “humans evolved naturally with no supernatural involvement.”

A majority of Catholic doctors (67%) agree with the statement that God initiated and guided an evolutionary process that has led to current human beings, while 11% believe that “God created humans exactly as they appear now.” By contrast, less than half of Protestant doctors (46%) believe that God initiated and guided an evolutionary process, while 35% believe that God created humans as they appear now. The majority of Jewish doctors (65%) agree more with the statement that “humans evolved naturally with no supernatural involvement.”

Do you agree more with the evolution or more with intelligent design?

More than half (63%) physicians overall agree more with evolution, while 34% agree more with ID. Of those who agree more with evolution, the majority of Jewish doctors (88%) and 61% Catholic doctors agree more with evolution, while slightly more than half of Protestants (55%) agree more with ID.

Several states are considering mandating the teaching of intelligent design alongside the teaching of evolution. Do you think that schools should be required, be allowed (but not required), or be prohibited from teaching ID?

Among the half of the overall respondents (50%)who feel that schools should be allowed (but not required) to teach ID, 52% Protestants and more than half Catholics (62%) feel that schools should be allowed. Conversely, more than half of Jewish doctors (59%) believe that schools should be prohibited from teaching intelligent design.

Do you believe that intelligent design has legitimacy as science or do you believe it is only a covert way of getting creationism into the schools?

While 42% believe that ID is “a legitimate scientific speculation” and the rest (58%) see it as “a religiously inspired pseudo-science,” an overwhelming majority of Jewish doctors (83%) and half of Catholic doctors (51%), and more than half of Protestant doctors (63%) view ID as simply “a religiously inspired pseudo- science.”

The study was conducted as part of a continuing investigation of the social, political, and economic issues confronting the U.S. health care system, stated the HCD press release.

The co-founder and managing partner of HCD Research, Glenn Kessler, noted the significance of the influence the religious and cultural background has on one’s scientific perspectives.

“As our earlier physician studies indicated,” Kessler said, “religion, culture and ethnic heritage have an impact on their views of science, even from this relatively homogenous group of physicians who share similar education, income and social status.”

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Understanding Creation, Evolution and Intelligent Design (Christian Post, 050527)

Interview with Dr. Michael Behe, Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University and a Roman Catholic

Some 80 years have passed since the Scopes Monkey Trial brought forward a passionate debate on teaching creation or evolution in public schools. While the public debate still remains, some scientists say scientific developments have fundamentally shifted the landscape on the creation-evolution debate and have introduced a new theory - intelligent design - to explain the origins of life.

Intelligent design (ID) advocate, Dr. Michael J. Behe, Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University and a Roman Catholic, took some time to speak to the Christian Post about his views on evolution, creationism, and Intelligent Design.

What is ID

ID is just the idea that you can detect the effects of an intelligent agent on parts of nature.

Intelligent agent is just a being who is smart enough to have done things that you’re looking at.

A non-controversial example, if you drove past Mt. Rushmore, you’d realize quickly that the mountains that you were looking at were not just shaped by unintelligent forces, but by some intelligent agents as well. In my thinking, we can also tell that an intelligent agent has affected parts of life as well, parts of biology.

What is the difference between ID and creationism?

In my thinking, ID goes out and looks at nature. It looks at what we have learned about nature and asks the question: what is the best way to explain what we have found in the nature? Creation science starts from the Bible, from the creation stories in the Bible and goes out and says what can we find in nature that can support the creation stories?

Are you saying that the starting points are different?

Yes, I think ID starts with the nature and creation science starts with the Bible.

What is the view of creationists on ID?

Some creationists think that ID does not go far enough. They say that it does not lead one to Jesus or even to God and therefore, it’s an inadequate idea for helping to save souls. I would say I totally agree with them. It’s not intended to be a complete answer to all the important questions of life. It’s only intended to be a very minimal idea relating to what we’ve found in biology.

Nonetheless, ID, on its own merits, is a good idea. It’s just not a complete answer to life’s most important questions.

What about ID vs. evolution?

ID is not opposed to evolution if evolution is simply understood as common descent or the theory that organisms descended one from the other, even with the modification. If ID deals only with the question of how did the elegant and sophisticated features of life we see in biology get here? Did they get here by an unintelligent process such as Darwin’s idea of random mutation and natural selection or did they get here by intelligent process, by the deliberate actions by an intelligent agent? So ID is actually compatible with a large amount of what goes under the name evolution.

Does a majority of ID advocates agree with evolution?

I think it’s a mix. It’s hard to tell. There are a fair number of ID advocates who do not think that common descent is correct. Many of them don’t think it’s correct simply because they see no evidence that one type of organism can change into another type of organism even with the intelligent direction. So they think the evidence does not support common descent.

I, on the other hand, think common descent is a reasonable idea because of what it accounts for the similarities that we see among different kinds of organisms. And I think if an intelligent agent arranges things, perhaps one kind of organism can in fact give rise to a different organism, for example, from fish to amphibian and to reptile and so on. I think intelligent agent guided process could have helped to do something.

In the Bible, in Genesis 1, it says God created each living organism “according to its own kind.” What is your response to this?

I’m not a theologian, so I stay away from that. I’ve heard theologians who are much more learner than I am arguing different interpretations of that. I’m just an ordinary biochemist so I try to stick to science and stay away from the theology.

Can all these three theories somehow be in harmony?

It all really depends on what you mean by creationism, evolution, and intelligent design. Everything depends on your definition of what you mean things. If evolution you mean an unintelligent process or a random process, then I don’t think that it’s compatible with ID. If by evolution you mean common descent and if by creation you mean a new sort of animals without ancestor then clearly they can’t both be correct. But if you think creation as God’s activity and evolution simply as descent, but which allows guidance by God, then yes, I think it can then reconcile all of those.

Currently, there is a very heated debate on whether ID should be allowed to be taught in public schools, what is the core reason why people think ID to be taught in public education?

I think one good reason is that many people think it’s true that unintelligent processes cannot account for the elegance and sophistication of what we see in the living world. And when they look at the evidence that is offered to support Darwin’s theory, they find it to be very inadequate. They find arguments for design that is for the proposition that some structures in life require intelligent direction to be compelling, to be persuasive.

I think many people just support ID teaching in schools because they think it’s a persuasive idea. They think that the exclusion of ID and teaching of Darwinism is based more on philosophical considerations. Because ID has what many people think of as religious implications, then simply because of that it’s not allowed to be taught in schools. But if the evidence supports it, then it should be allowed to be taught even if it has religious implications. A truly neutral approach to teaching science in schools is to allow the evidence to guide one’s conclusions and not to artificially rule one idea out of bounds simply because the person doesn’t like its implications.

Do you see ID having enough evidence?

Yes, I certainly do. Well, I am a biochemist and biochemistry studies molecular basis of life. And in the past 50 years, science has discovered that at the very foundation of life there are sophisticated molecular machines, which do the work in the cell. I mean, literally, there are real machines inside everybody’s cells and this is what they are called by all biologists who work in the field, molecular machines. They’re little trucks and busses that run around the cell that takes supplies from one end of the cell to the other. They’re little traffic signals to regulate the flow. They’re sign posts to tell them when they get to the right destination. They’re little outboard motors that allow some cells to swim. If you look at the parts of these, they’re remarkably like the machineries that we use in our everyday world.

The argument is that we know from experience that machinery in our everyday world that we use in our everyday world required design, required an intelligent agent that put it together, who understood how it was going to be used and who assembled the parts. By an inductive argument, when we find such sophisticated machinery in other places too, we can conclude that it also requires design. So now that we found it in life and in the very foundation of life, I and other ID advocates argue that there is no reason to not reach the same conclusion and that in fact, these things were indeed designed.

About 50 years ago Watson and Crick deduced the structure of DNA, the double helix. The first structures of proteins, which are the parts like the machines in the cell, were discovered and before we really didn’t know how the cells worked at all. In the past 50 years, we’ve gotten more and more knowledge about how the cell works. And the more we know, the more sophisticated we have discovered that it is.

Michael J. Behe, originally from Harrisburg, PA., graduated from Drexel University in 1974 with a B.S. in Chemistry and did his graduate studies in biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania where he was awarded the Ph.D. in 1978 for his dissertation research on sickle-cell disease. From 1978-1982 he did postdoctoral work on DNA structure at the National Institutes of Health. From 1982-85 he was Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Queens College in New York City, where he met his wife.

In 1985 he moved to Lehigh University where he is currently Professor of Biochemistry. In his career he has authored over 40 technical papers and one book, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, which argues that living system at the molecular level are best explained as being the result of deliberate intelligent design.

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New Poll Shows Majority of U.S. Adults Believe in Creationism (Christian Post, 050708)

A new poll indicates that nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults believe in creationism - the belief that God created human beings.

Harris Interactive® conducted a nationwide survey of 1000 U.S. adults between June 17 and 21, 2005. Of those polled, 64% agreed with the idea of creationism, while approximately 22% supported the basic theory of evolution, that “human beings evolved from earlier species.” 10% agreed with the idea of intelligent design, that “human beings are so complex that they required a powerful force or intelligent being to help create them.”

The Harris poll also asked about what should be taught in schools. A majority (55%) of the respondents said that all three theories should be taught in public schools, while only 12% agreed with the teaching of evolution only. A greater percentage of those polled (23%) supported the teaching of creationism only and a fraction (4%) supported intelligent design only.

The percentage of U.S. adults who do not believe in evolution increased from 46% in 1994 to 54% in this year’s survey. Trends in the data indicate that those who agree with creationism tend to be older (55 years or older), from the south, affiliated with Republican and conservative views, and without a college degree.

Those who supported evolution tended to be between ages 18 to 54, from the Northeast and West, affiliated with Democrats and liberal views, and with a college education. The poll also showed that a majority of those who agreed with evolution also believed in creationism. A large number within both the evolution and creationism group supported the teaching of all three ideas in public schools.

These very issues are the topic of debate in several states. The most widely publicized have been the hearings on evolution and intelligent design held in Kansas last May. Officials from the state Board of Education heard testimony from both sides and plan to issue new state science standards later this summer that may or may not incorporate intelligent design.

Pennsylvania legislators have been debating a new bill that will require teachers in public schools to teach intelligent design along with evolution. Recently, representatives from the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, known as an intelligent design think-tank, wrote a letter to the state legislature in opposition to the bill.

These and other debates taking place in the classroom all the way to the courthouse have yet to be decided, evidence that the evolution-creation debate is still as controversial today as it was back in the 1920s when the Scopes Monkey Trial put the teaching of evolution on the stand.

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Signs of Intelligence? What the neo-Darwinists don’t understand about theories of Intelligent Design. (Weekly Standard, 050713)

IF YOU’VE BEEN CASTING A SIDELONG GLANCE at the world through the liberal press of late you’ve likely been alarmed by the latest faith-based assault on science and rationality. You might have been moved, despite your better instincts—born of the sad knowledge of hope’s futility in the new Dark Age of George W. Bush’s Evangelical Crusade at home and abroad—but perhaps you couldn’t suppress the tepid delight at having your biases affirmed in the gallant counterassault on Darwin’s religious assailants by Evolution’s latter day devotees. The last defenders of Reason fight on in bold, quixotic determination, allied with the chattering presses, preaching to the choir in the name of their ancestral hero.

A recent editorial in the New York Times bemoans the legislative progress of the “dangerous” brood of creationists, barely disguised in the pseudo-scientific trappings of “intelligent design.” The editors charge the movement, and anyone who questions Darwin on the basis of “supernatural explanations,” with breaking the presumably unspoken code of positing forces beyond “the usual domain of science.” The editor’s at the Times don’t seem concerned that many physicists, in light of the curious ability of subatomic particles to occupy infinite locations at once (one of those quirks in nature resistant to “natural” explanation), propose a “Many Worlds hypothesis” where people live infinite lives in infinite parallel universes—each hidden from each other—to account for every possible quantum outcome.

Maybe ideas like this are “scientific” as long as they’re labeled “hypotheses.” Once you’ve called your idea a theory, only then does

metaphysical speculation seem to breach the purview of physics. But another impassioned stab at the “junk science” of intelligent design in the New Yorker by H. Allen Orr, a biologist at the University of Rochester, belies any claim to scientific rigor by the liberal media or, when ideology compensates for intellectual laziness, science itself.

THE PURPOSE of this argument is not to defend the science of intelligent design. With legions of biblical activists and conservative lawmakers among self-appointed experts coming out of the woodwork to testify to the “problems with Darwin’s theory,” ID hardly seems to need my help. And to be fair, the counterassault on evolution’s detractors has been convincing in casting reasonable doubt against ID’s methods. On the evidence presented intelligent design does come off as less than sufficiently coherent or validated as a “theory”—especially if Darwin’s ingenious, broadly encompassing, experimentally bolstered body of work sets the bar. Based on Orr’s sometimes cogent parsing out of the so-called intelligent design theory’s lapses in logic and consistency, even theists are left suspicious of the fledgling movement’s present fitness for the classroom.

But while the would-be Darwins might have succeeded in dismissing ID on scientific grounds, their argument has been less convincing in a secondary aim. Much of the controversy surrounding their hero derives from an aspect of Darwinism (as currently construed) that is itself unscientific; one might even say, if not “religious,” distinctly political—Darwinism’s vaguely defined but apparent relationship to atheism. As a caveat to its attack on ID the press denies any such relationship. The Times op-ed invokes “many empirical scientists” who are implied to dismiss ID in spite of their faith. These theistic scientists, the editorial claims, understand that “theories about how God interacts with the world” are “beyond the scope of their discipline,” and by implication are disinclined to entertain challenges to Darwin based on questions of divine agency. So the Times’s preference among scientists of a religious turn of mind are those who keep God in church or the closet where He belongs. It’s okay to believe in God as long as God doesn’t step on Darwin’s toes—as long as you’ve reconciled your faith with Darwin’s ostensibly infallible insights.

In the New Yorker, Orr takes a similar tack. In careful language he denies the notion that Darwinism is “yoked to atheism” listing the “five founding fathers of twentieth-century evolutionary biology,” three of whom were religious (a fourth dabbled in Eastern mysticism). He goes on to mention the late Pope John Paul II’s oft-touted recognition of evolution as “more than a hypothesis” and then appears to give a sly wink-nod to his fellow atheists in concluding “Whatever larger conclusions one thinks should follow from Darwinism . . . evolution and religion have often coexisted.”

(Of course, had Orr attempted to unpack the precise implications of John Paul’s admission, he would have had to concluded one of two possibilities: the Pope was either claiming that Darwin’s theory was “true” down to the last detail, which would suggest that God, or the “miraculous,” has no agency at all in human development; or, on the other hand, the Pope might have been acknowledging the obvious, confirmed truths surrounding evolution’s insights—man was not created in his present form all at once, the fossil record stretches back more than 10,000 years, etc.—while leaving room to disagree with radical atheistic interpretations of Darwin, or with Darwin himself on specifics. This is just one instance where Orr ignores nuance and distorts logic for polemical convenience.)

It may be the case that evolution’s founding fathers had no deliberate pact with atheism, but if the two are still unrelated why does the Atheist Alliance (“the only national democratic atheist organization in the United

States” according to their website) partake in the annual celebration of “Darwin Day”? Why does the National Secular Society of Great Britain feature the face of Charles Darwin as part of a series of “Hero’s of Atheism” coffee mugs and why was the father of evolution voted the overwhelming favorite hero by the organizations members?

And those groups are just the riff-raff. Respected intellectuals often make the same association—people like Oxford’s Richard Dawkins, for instance, the biologist and “great popularizer” of evolution whom Orr mentions. In an interview on beliefnet.com, Dawkins explains “why the world would be better off without religion.” Dawkins compares religion to a computer virus; claims never to have met a “genuinely intelligent” person who was religious; and equates baptism with child abuse. The eminent British biologist envisions a “paradise on earth . . . ruled by enlightened rationality” and free of religion. Without religion, he reasons, there would be “a much better chance of no more war.” “Obviously,” he continues, “nothing like 9/11 [would happen], because that’s clearly motivated by religion”; in the absence of religion “there would be less hatred, because a lot of the hatred in the world is sectarian hatred.” If people lived “according to rationalism,” says Dawkins, “There would be less waste of time. People would concentrate on really worthwhile things, instead of wasting time on religion, astrology, crystal-gazing, fortune-telling, things like that.”

Dawkins, of course, would build his atheist “paradise” on the incorruptible moral foundations of science and art, as though Stalin, Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jong Il had never reigned. But that’s the world according to one of Darwinism’s central figures today. Is this the stuff of science and enlightened rationalism?

ORR’S IDEAS on evolution and religion, though less caustic and vulgar than Dawkins’s, are no more scientific. His New Yorker essay is evasive enough that it’s hard to pin down his atheism, but in the end he can’t resist weighing in on divine influence. In dismissing the ideas of William A. Dembski, a mathematician and leading theorist of intelligent design, Orr argues the following:

Organisms aren’t trying to match any “independently given pattern”: evolution has no goal, and the history of life isn’t trying to get anywhere . . . Despite all the loose talk about design and machines, organisms aren’t striving to realize some engineer’s blueprint; they’re striving (if they can be said to strive at all) only to have more offspring than the next fellow.

All this coming from someone who in the same essay denies that Darwinism and atheism go hand in hand—whether or not they “should.” And why should they? Well, according to Orr, evolutionary biology provides evidence that life evolved on its own with no purpose but survival. Specifically he points to the fact that species of fish and crustaceans found in dark caves often have degenerate eyes, or “eyes that begin to form only to be covered by skin” which he deems “crazy contraptions that no intelligent agent would design.”

If Darwinists and liberals examined their own logic as scrupulously as that of everyone else, they might deem this line of argument, which speaks to “theories about how God interacts with the world” (if only in denying any such interaction) “beyond the scope” of science. It doesn’t take a trained biologist to recognize Orr’s statements as nothing more than assertions, inferences based on the speculation that no intelligence could account for what Orr perceives as the chaos and randomness of life. Half-hearted concessions to faith notwithstanding, Orr doesn’t really care that four of the five founding fathers of 20th century evolutionary biology, and many scientists today, and the 80% of Americans whose faith he mocks, clearly disagree with him in one way or another. He’s interested in his understanding of evolution alone.

ORR’S ASSERTION that life arose purely by accident and evolves by itself—with no goal but to prolong itself—is simply an atheist creation myth. It might not contradict anything observable (or at least established) in the known universe, but neither does the notion that invisible forces act upon the visible, natural process of evolution. The difference is Orr assumes that what we see is what we see, that nothing eludes our—or his—current understanding.

In defiance of the varied voices and perspectives in and apart from his field, Orr squints through a keyhole view of the world, interpreting what little he sees in quasi-rational isolation. [re-insert (?): While all reasonable parties can understand why scientists and teachers might be loath to overhaul their methods based on the scientific expertise of Rick Santorum, surely sensitive liberal editors and readers get why decent, intelligent Americans, who believing in God believe that God might have some part in the way atoms interact to form life, and the way individual lives interact to inform the evolution of species-why people who believe in a guiding principle beyond selfish survival might be reluctant to entrust their children’s minds to an Orr, let alone a Dawkins. The latter, in a rare twist of near-clarity allows that although life arises and evolves from nothing besides this violent preservationist instinct, humans have reached a point where we can “escape” the ugliness of our origins.

Our brains have become so big, says Dawkins, that we can conjure order from chaos on our own. We can create “new goals, new purposes that are not directly related to natural selection at all.” Though we are born for no good reason we’ve become smart enough to “seek more altruistic, sympathetic, artistic things that have nothing to do with the preservation of our selfish genes.” But as for why once-lifeless particles are compelled to coalesce in ways that give rise to life, why microscopic particles that don’t need to worry about surviving evolve to take on such a burden, and why, if life becomes life by accident, for no purpose, why then does it hold onto to itself, prolonging the agony of survival when it could just as easily let go and return to quiet oblivion; if you can’t help but wonder why, if not for some hidden purpose, would selfish, brutal, mindless life evolve to pursue beautiful abstractions that have no clear evolutionary function—what purpose does evolutionary purpose serve—well, don’t ask. Buzzwords like “random mutation” will only get you so far.

INTERESTINGLY, much of what today’s evolutionists claim is far from clear in Darwin’s own writing.

“I see no good reason,” writes Darwin in the conclusion of The Origin of Species, “why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of anyone.” Illustrating his point he goes on to describe a letter he received from a “celebrated author and divine” that had “gradually learned to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development and needful forms, as to believe He required a fresh act of creation . . . “ Darwin doesn’t exactly endorse this theistic take on evolution right then and there, though he ends his treatise with the following: “There is a 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 . . . from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved” [italics mine].

Darwin’s lyrical crescendo calls to mind, among others, Michael J. Behe, the biochemist and intelligent design theorist claiming that, starting from the “irreducible complexity” of a cell (which itself must be designed by an unspecified intelligence), life might evolve on its own through Darwinian processes. Unlike the so-called “creationist” Behe, Darwin, to the discomfort of many of today’s evolutionists, makes specific reference to “the Creator,” only one of several references often ignored by those quoting Darwin.

So why, exactly, is intelligent design “squarely at odds with Darwin,” as Orr claims in the New Yorker?

GRANTED this particular reference to the Creator, added after The Origin’s first addition, might have been a pragmatic concession to the religious police of Darwin’s time, an attempt at damage control. Or the reference might, as some suggest, have been added to keep peace within his home with his deeply devout wife. Maybe Darwin wrote what he did with tongue in cheek, confident that his ideas would revolutionize society and that people like Orr and Dawkins would one day come along to tell everyone what he really meant. It’s unlikely, given Darwin’s claim in his 1876 autobiography that he’d been convinced of God’s existence when he first published his theory. But Darwin didn’t end up religious in any tangible sense, and later in life his theistic conviction seemed to fade. Still it’s somewhat confusing how he wound up with his face on an atheist coffee mug when he himself seems to have ended up an agnostic: In 1876 (six years before his death) he wrote “I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems [as the existence of God]. The mystery of the beginning of all things is impossible by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.”

Not only did he claim not to know whether God existed, Darwin insisted that we can’t know. So on what authority does Dawkins parade his atheism, and Orr hint slyly at his, if not Darwin’s? Have they found definitive proof against God in evolution that Darwin missed? Dawkins and Orr could be said to depict the “neo-Darwinist” narrative of history, a vision of life and its origins that is less equivocal on God than Darwin’s, taking his (almost) perfect theory to its “logical” conclusion. Given what we’ve seen of neo-Darwinist logic we might be safer sticking with Darwin’s take on Darwin.

IT’S TRUE THAT IN THE VISIBLE, known, world Darwin seemed to find no evidence of the Divine. He seemed to believe, like Dawkins and Orr, that life evolves without God. In the opening chapter of The Origin of Species Darwin, in tracing the roots of his theory, praises the natural scientist Lamark for “the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all change in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition.” In the conclusion he adds “Nothing at first can appear more difficult to believe than that the more complex organs and instincts have been perfected, not by means superior to, though analogous with, human reason, but by the innumerable slight variations . . . Nevertheless, this difficulty . . . cannot be considered real if we admit the following propositions . . . .” [Italics mine]

Darwin supports the view that life evolves autonomously with evidence of a “struggle for existence leading to the preservation of profitable deviations of structure or instinct.” In other words organisms fend for themselves, and those that are strongest or most adaptable survive longer, passing on the distinguishing traits to their offspring, and they to theirs as weaker prototypes die off and a species evolves to look more like the elite minority with each successive generation. The evidence for this is overwhelming, and pretty much rules out the notion that God created man in his present form. Darwin, however, seems to jump from identifying the struggle to assuming it wholly unmediated.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN’s campaign against Darwin has been misdirected. ID’s theorists concede too much in debating on neo-Darwinist terms, fighting assertion with assertion, or seeking to contradict evolution by way of obscure mathematics. In declaring one’s intent to disprove Darwin one grants, based on all evidence until now, that Darwin had proven himself. And he did in many ways that most of us can agree on. But just because most of his theory remains sound and remarkably descriptive of the world as we now recognize it; just because he was right on so much doesn’t mean we should take his every word for gospel.

Maybe changes that seem “random” to a neo-Darwinian fundamentalist, or to Darwin himself, might seem deliberate to a more evolved intelligence. How would Darwin’s self-proclaimed legatees prove that we got here by shear accident, with no inherent purpose and destined for nothing but extinction? If someone could explain this view without merely reciting Darwinian koans for “natural forces” that Darwin himself might not have thought through all the way—if Orr and Dawkins could prove all that I’d order my Darwin mug in the mail today and shoot myself tomorrow.

IMAGINE A WORLD where high school students could not only absorb a fraction of Darwin’s profound insights, but could discuss them critically. Imagine an open exchange of interpretations that make unembarrassed use of literature, philosophy, and even theology—ways of thinking beyond the limiting scope of science. All modes of thought and innovation come with their own set of limitations, blind spots which other disciplines can illuminate. If we read Darwin more carefully, or at all, and discussed his ideas in good faith to differing perspectives, atheists might be less anxious to claim his image for their anti-religious crusade and creationists might be slower to banish him and his modern minions to the fiery pits. The separation of church and state was intended to protect democracy and religious freedom from despots in holy robes, not to protect school children (or science) from religion. It is unbecoming of teachers to proselytize students on behalf of any particular faith or ethos, including atheism. If religious or theistic philosophies are deemed inappropriate to science curricula, so should any ideas that expressly contradict those philosophies. Neo-Darwinists, however, aren’t interested in fairness or academic freedom. They’d rather take cheap shots at ideas that can’t defend themselves. With the moral and propagandistic support of the media, they prefer to attack an argument at its weakest point instead of its strongest.

In the context of a serious, civilized debate a scientist like Dawkins might come to understand that religion, when properly invoked, is a vehicle for knowledge, progress, and humanistic unity like science and other rational disciplines. Religion is not inherently opposed to reason. At the same time, science often flirts with the mystical, veiled in the tortured gravitas of technical nomenclature; calling on the imagination but often reluctant to admit it.

If the current evolution debate is any indication science has hit a wall, reaching a point in its development where once-reliable paradigms will no longer suffice to keep up with the mysteries of existence, seeming greater and more numerous each day. Sorting it all out will take help from disciplines that have focused for centuries on the hidden dimensions of life that science has barely begun to acknowledge. One can only hope more scientists will find the humility to ask.

Isaac Constantine is a writer in New York City.

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Censoring God: Why is the science establishment so threatened by the intelligent design movement? (WorldNetDaily, 050801)

The theory of evolution and how it should be taught in the nation’s schools – a crucial debate now erupting in divisive controversy in state after state – is the topic of the groundbreaking August edition of WND’s monthly Whistleblower magazine.

The issue is titled “CENSORING GOD: Why is the science establishment so threatened by the intelligent design movement?”

Controversy over the exclusive teaching of evolution to the nation’s students has reaching a boiling point, with President Bush now coming out publicly in favor of teaching intelligent design side by side with evolution, “so people can understand what the debate is about.”

Most Americans have been led to believe the evolution debate is a tug of war between science and religion – a view that originated with the Scopes “monkey trial,” immortalized by the mega-hit movie “Inherit the Wind.” In the film, ignorant and near-rabid Christian fundamentalists come close to lynching a courageous high school teacher named Bertram Cates. In fact, in the opening scene, the Christian mob marches to the high school where Cates is teaching evolution, has him arrested and jailed, burns the young teacher in effigy and throws a rock through the jail window, injuring him.

But the movie was pure propaganda. In real life, the teacher, John Scopes, never spent any time in jail, never paid a fine – in fact, apparently never even taught evolution. The whole affair was instigated, not by “Christian fundamentalists,” but by the ACLU, which was eager to challenge Tennessee’s Butler Act that prohibited the teaching that humans descended from lower orders of animals. Although the film depicted drooling religious nuts singing about hanging Scopes’ famous lawyer, Clarence Darrow, from a tree, in real life the townspeople gave Darrow a banquet, with the lawyer later writing that he had “been better treated, kindlier and more hospitably” than he could have imagined.

Ironically, it is only now, in today’s America – 80 years after the famed 1925 “monkey trial” – that the scary specter of censorship and persecution raised by “Inherit the Wind” is actually occurring. Just like in the movie, intolerant guardians of sacred orthodoxy are persecuting high school science teachers. Keepers of the faith – gravely offended at the slightest challenge – insist on unquestioning adherence to the accepted teachings, shunning and persecuting any who dare to buck the established order. Freedom of academic inquiry is unwelcome.

But in a bizarre twist, in 2005 it is the evolutionists who are the agitated defenders of orthodoxy. And it is science teachers – at least those who dare to inform their students of any fact or evidence that tends to contradict or undermine the evolution theory – that are today’s “John Scopes.”

For years, it seems, the press has had a hard time reporting accurately on the evolution debate. WorldNetDaily is breaking the mold with this issue of Whistleblower, which reveals, perhaps for the first time in a journalistic publication, what the controversy is really all about. This issue is guaranteed to provide some surprises and powerful new insights, even to those who are already familiar with the subject.

Highlights of “CENSORING GOD” include:

* “Do we really seek the truth?” by Joseph Farah, on the current challenges to evolution

* “Censorship!” by David Kupelian, profiling high school teachers persecuted, not for teaching creationism or intelligent design, but simply for pointing out bona fide scientific arguments and evidence that are unfavorable to the evolution theory

* “Explosive memo reveals Darwinist strategy for Kansas” by Jack Cashill, showing how evolution proponents schemed to portray challengers as “political opportunists, evangelical activists and ignoramuses”

* “What is ‘intelligent design’?” by Jay W. Richards, Ph.D., in which a top ID proponent provides an in-depth exploration of the subject, separating the myths from the reality

* “Smithsonian in uproar over intelligent design article” by Art Moore, on how a museum researcher’s career was threatened after he published an article favorable to intelligent design

* “5 myths about the debate over evolution” by Robert Crowther of the Discovery Institute

* “400 scientists skeptical of Darwin,” calling evolution theory “the great white elephant of contemporary thought”

* “Hoodwinked by Darwin’s heirs,” in which Jack Cashill shows why evolution theory has attracted so many fraudsters right from the start

* “Darwin defender retracts ‘libelous’ claims” – in which a top evolution educator admits she publicly defamed a parent/activist opposed to evolution-only teaching

* “Are we designs or occurrences? And should science and government prejudge the question?” – a comprehensive and highly insightful look behind the great debate over origins – by John H. Calvert

* “The case for an Intelligent Designer” by James Perloff, a stunning look at how, all throughout history, the vast majority of great scientists have believed in God as the great Designer

* “The evolution matrix” by David Kupelian, an eye-opening comparison of the ways people perceived nature before and after the advent of Darwin’s theory

“I thought I understood the basics of this subject before undertaking this Whistleblower issue,” said David Kupelian, managing editor of WND and Whistleblower. “But I learned so much from this month’s edition – in fact, for the first time I really grasped how political, agenda-driven and unscientific the science establishment can be!”

“There are very few issues as important as the subject of origins and what we are teaching our children about it,” added Joseph Farah, founder and editor of WorldNetDaily and Whistleblower. “What we believe in this area affects everything else, our entire worldview. It affects our religious beliefs, our view of the proper role of government, even our views regarding the sacredness of life itself. For that reason, August’s Whistleblower edition is absolutely a must-read. You simply will not see the evolution debate the same way after reading this issue.”

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400 scientists skeptical of Darwin (WorldNetDaily, 050721)

Theory ‘great white elephant of contemporary thought’

More than 400 scientists from all disciplines have signed onto a growing list of skeptics of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life, according to the Seattle-based Discovery Institute.

“Darwin’s theory of evolution is the great white elephant of contemporary thought,” said David Berlinski, a mathematician and philosopher of science with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, or CSC. “It is large, almost completely useless, and the object of superstitious awe.”

The Discovery Institute, a leading proponent of Intelligent Design, first published its Statement of Dissent from Darwin in 2001.

The think tank challenged statements made in the PBS “Evolution” series, which claimed that no scientists disagreed with Darwinian evolution.

“The fact is that a significant number of scientists are extremely skeptical that Darwinian evolution can explain the origins of life,” said John G. West, associate director of the CSC. “We expect that as scientists engage in the wider debate over materialist evolutionary theories, this list will continue to grow, and grow at an even more rapid pace than we’ve seen this past year.”

The institute says that in the past three months, 29 scientists, including eight biologists, have signed the statement, which includes more than 70 biologists.

Two prominent Russian biologists from Moscow State University, Lev V. Beloussov and Vladimir L. Voeikov, are recent signers.

Voeikov is a professor of bioorganic chemistry and Beloussov is a professor of embryology. Both are members of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.

Voeikov said, “The ideology and philosophy of neo-Darwinism which is sold by its adepts as a scientific theoretical foundation of biology seriously hampers the development of science and hides from students the field’s real problems.”

West says the talk in media about “science vs. religion” is misleading.

“This list is a witness to the growing group of scientists who challenge Darwinian theory on scientific grounds,” he said.

Other prominent biologists who have signed the list include evolutionary biologist and textbook author Stanley Salthe;Richard von Sternberg an evolutionary biologist at the Smithsonian Institution and the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Biotechnology Information;and Giuseppe Sermonti, Editor of Rivista di Biologia/Biology Forum.

The list also includes scientists from Princeton, Cornell, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Ohio State University, Purdue and the University of Washington.

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The intelligent design bogeyman (Townhall.com, 050805)

David Limbaugh

Our secular popular culture is throwing a fit over President Bush’s endorsement of teaching in public schools the controversies surrounding Darwinian theory.

Note that the president did not recommend that the teaching of Darwinism be banned in public schools, merely that the theory of intelligent design (ID) ought to be taught as well. Bush said, “I think part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought.”

The main players in the ID movement are not even insisting on that much. Discovery Institute, for example, opposes the mandatory teaching of ID in public schools but favors requiring students to be exposed to criticisms of Darwin’s theory.

But whether you believe ID theory ought to get equal billing with Darwinian theory, some lesser treatment, or that students should at least be apprised of alleged chinks in the Darwinian armor, what’s all the fuss about?

Don’t academics purport to champion free and open inquiry? What, then, are they so afraid of regarding the innocuous introduction into the classroom of legitimate questions concerning Darwinism?

Their defensiveness toward challenges to their dogma is inexplicable unless you understand their attitude as springing from a worldview steeped in strong, secular predispositions that must be guarded with a blind religious fervor.

Indeed, it appears many Darwinists are guilty of precisely that of which they accuse ID proponents: having a set of preconceived assumptions that taint their scientific objectivity.

Don’t take my word for it. Consider the words of Darwinist Richard Lewontin of Harvard. “Our willingness,” confessed Lewontin, “to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to understanding the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for the unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment to materialism.  materialism is absolute for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.”

So is God the real bogeyman for some Darwinists? Is that why they fight to suppress any theory, like ID, they fear might allow God’s “foot in the door”?

And, if their science were unassailable, would they so vigorously resist its subjection to academic scrutiny by scientists no longer drinking the Darwin Kool-Aid? It’s no secret that scientists who have broken from Darwinian orthodoxy have been ridiculed, suppressed and ostracized by much of the Orwellian scientific establishment.

Many of ID’s cynical detractors patronizingly frame this entire debate in terms of a struggle between faith and science. Intelligent Design, they say, is but a thinly disguised argument for Biblical creationism and its proponents threaten to obliterate the “wall of separation” between church and state by cleverly sneaking creationism back into the schools inside the Trojan horse of ID.

But that is simply false. ID is fundamentally science-based. The fact that scientific inquiry leads certain scientists toward a conclusion compatible with the Judeo-Christian worldview — that intelligent causes were behind the creation of the universe and life — does not disqualify them as scientists any more than the militant secularism of many Darwinists disqualifies them.

Nor does ID’s compatibility with the Judeo-Christian worldview require that it be classified as religious rather than scientific. If ID’s theories were faith-based rather than science-based, the secular scientific community would have a stronger case in demanding they not be introduced into science classes.

But no amount of protest and name-calling from the scientific community will change the fact that ID proponents are not pseudo-scientists. You might be surprised to learn that over 400 scientists from all disciplines have signed onto a list of those expressing skepticism “of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.” And that list is growing, despite the persecution of some signers since they signed it.

This is most interesting, in light of statements made in PBS’s “Evolution” series that no scientists disagreed with Darwinian evolution. I ask you: Which side is playing fast and loose with the facts?

As one recent signatory, the prestigious Russian biologist Vladimir L. Voeikov said, “The ideology and philosophy of neo-Darwinism, which is sold by its adepts as a scientific theoretical foundation of biology, seriously hampers the development of science and hides from students the field’s real problems.”

A short column is not the place to debate the merits of ID versus Darwinism, but it is an appropriate venue to offer the humble suggestion that the very essence of science — the search for causes — militates in favor of exposing students to modern criticisms of Darwinism. Introducing kids to scientific challenges to Darwinism and to the alternative ID theory would vindicate the scientific method and science itself. Opponents should lighten up, and the public should insist on a fair fight.

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On solid ground: evolution versus intelligent design (Townhall.com, 050804)

Chuck Colson

President Bush sent reporters into a tizzy this week by saying that he thought schools ought to teach both evolution and intelligent design. Students ought to hear both theories, he said, so they “can understand what the debate is about.”

Well, the usual critics jumped all over the president, but he’s absolutely right. Considering all competing theories was once the very definition of academic freedom. But today, the illiberal forces of secularism want to stifle any challenges to Darwin—even though Darwin is proving to be eminently challengeable.

Take biochemist Michael Behe’s argument. He says that the cell is irreducibly complex. All the parts have to work at once, so it could not have evolved. No one has been able to successfully challenge Behe’s argument.

In fact, the scientific case for intelligent design is so strong that, as BreakPoint listeners have heard me say, even Antony Flew, once the world’s leading philosopher of atheism, has renounced his life-long beliefs and has become, as he puts it, a deist. He now believes an intelligent designer designed the universe, though he says he cannot know God yet.

I was in Oxford last week, speaking at the C. S. Lewis Summer Institute, and had a chance to visit with Flew. He told a crowd that, as a professional philosopher, he had used all the tools of his trade to arrive at what he believed were intellectually defensible suppositions supporting atheism. But the intelligent design movement shook those presuppositions. He said, however, on philosophical grounds that he could not prove the existence of the God of the Bible.

In the question period, I walked to the microphone and told him as nicely as I could that he had put himself in an impossible box. He could prove theism was the only philosophically sustainable position, but he could not prove who God was. I said, “If you could prove who God was, you could not love God—which is the principle object of life.”

I admitted that I had once gotten myself into the same position. I had studied biblical worldview for years and believed that I could prove beyond a doubt that the biblical worldview is the only one that is rational, the only one that conforms to the truth of the way the world is made. But that led to a spiritual crisis of sorts, when one morning in my quiet time I realized that while I could prove all of this, I could not prove who God was. I began to worry: When this life was over, would I really meet Him?

Some weeks later, as I describe in my new book The Good Life, it hit me that if I could prove God, I could not know Him. The reason is that, just as He tells us, He wants us to come like little children with faith. If you could resolve all intellectual doubts, there would be no need for faith. You would then know God the same way that you know the tree in the garden outside your home. You would look at it, know it is there, and that’s it, as Thomas Aquinas once said.

Faith is necessary because without it you cannot love God. So as I said to Dr. Flew, if you could prove God, you couldn’t love Him, which is His whole purpose in creating you. He later told me that I have raised a very provocative point that he would have to give some thought to.

So, I hope you will pray for Antony Flew, a gentle and courageous man who appears to be seeking God. And we should remember that if this brilliant man can be persuaded out of his atheism by intelligent design, anyone can see it. Those of us contending for the intelligent design point of view, which now includes among our ranks the president of the United States, I’m happy to say, are on increasingly solid ground.

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Thumbs Up: President Bush is right about evolution and design. (National Review Online, 050809)

Opposable thumbs: mighty useful. In fact, we anthropologists put the lowly opposable thumb near the top of physical characteristics that make humans human. Without fully opposable thumbs, we would wrench-less in a world without plumbers, soccer would be the only sport, and the Moonlight Sonata would have to be whistled. The manual dexterity that, when you think about it, makes civilization possible, owes quite a bit to our thumbs.

Well, of course, not just our thumbs. As handy as thumbs are, they are part of an engineered package of exquisitely fine-tuned brain-eye-hand coordination. We can, as a birthright, do myriad things with our hands that are beyond the reach of even the most ingenious chimpanzee. And a good case can be made that the rapidly expanding brain of human ancestors over the last million or so years came about as part of a feedback loop with manual dexterity. As our ancestors learned to make and rely on tools, the edge in the race for survival went to those who were better at it.

At an interview with some reporters from Texas on August 1, President Bush parried a question about whether schools should teach “intelligent design” as an alternative to evolution by saying, “I think part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought.” By itself, this seems a mild, even innocuous opinion. But that hardly tempered the reaction in the press. The New York Times picked up the story two days later, and we were off to another liberal media cage fight between Outraged Scientists and Unrelenting Creationists.

The Case for Modesty and Restraint

This battle is unnecessary and intellectually irresponsible. To a large degree it is staged by secular Left in effort to maintain its monopolistic control of education and its predominant influence in the sciences. But, in fact, evolution and intelligent design can coexist without the universe cracking asunder. All we need here is a little theoretical modesty and restraint.

A good place to start is to distinguish between the theory of evolution (without the capital E) and Evolution as a grand and, apart from a few rough edges, supposedly comprehensive account of speciation and genetic change. Small-e evolution is an intellectually robust theory that gives coherent order to a huge range of disparate facts. In contrast, capital E Evolution, is a bit illusory. Like a lot of scientific theories, on close inspection it is really a stitched-together fabric of hypotheses. Some of them are central and well-attested, while others are little more than guesswork. Some phenomena such as natural selection and genetic drift are on solid ground; but others like late Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” in which evolution proceeds in widely spaced bursts, are pretty speculative. Evolution (with the capital E) is today far from being a single comprehensive concept. Gould’s last work, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, was an attempt to repair that situation with a brand-new synthesis. The jury is still out on whether he succeeded.

While I am a proponent of small-e evolution, I recognize that it doesn’t provide satisfactory answers to some key questions. We don’t have compelling answers to how life began on earth, whether the self-organizing stuff that we recognize as life depends on earth-like chemistry, or whether nature’s profligate complexity is inevitable. Earth was home only to complacent bacterial mats from about 3.5 to 2.5 billion years ago. That’s a run almost as long as Madonna’s career, but it did eventually give way to more complex organisms that could thrive in the presence of oxygen.

We also don’t have any really convincing explanation of why nature split so many organisms into two sexes.

And above all, evolutionary theory hits a wall in trying to explain what happened with the emergence of fully modern humans about 150,000 years ago. We have a tissue of tiny clues, some of the most intriguing of which come from genetics. The picture accepted by most (by no means all) anthropologists is that a tiny population of modern humans — no more than a few hundred — emerged in east Africa and eventually dispersed over the entire world.

What set these people off from our older ancestors, however, is crucial. It wasn’t their thumbs, which, like most of their anatomy, were essentially the same as their immediate predecessors. Give or take some fine points of the cranium, we were human before we were human. But the version of humanity that appeared abruptly on the scene about 150,000 years ago had some strange new quality.

It may have been a mutation that gave rise to fully articulate language; or it could have been a leap in capacity for symbolic or abstract thought. These are the likeliest scientific guesses. The material facts are that the newly emerged form of human being was a prolific inventor. The stone tools made by his predecessors remained unchanged generation to generation for hundreds of thousands of years. An 800,000 year-old hand-ax looks identical to a 200,000 year-old hand-ax: and everyone used exactly the same tools. Intellectual property rights were not at issue. Then suddenly these new humans began to invent new tools and new ways of making tools at an unprecedented pace; different groups of them made different tools; and, before too much longer, began to trade group from group.

The Birth of Culture

We can give a name to what happened: with the biological emergence of modern humans came both the capacity for and the realization of “culture.” Maybe geneticists will, at some point, isolate a gene or genes that make complex, symbol-based culture possible. Indeed, we already see some hints of this in the gene FOXP2, which affects our capacity to learn language and which mutated to its current form about 200,000 years ago.

But to speak of the beginning of culture and the emergence of our species by way of some genetic mutations from anatomically similar ancestors does little to explain the profound mystery of the event. Of course, if we are convinced in advance that genetic mutation is a random, material event, the results of which are sorted out by the struggle for survival, the immense mystery dissolves into happenstance blips in strands of East African DNA, c. 150,000-200,000 years ago.

But at that point, we have moved beyond scientific evolution to doctrinaire Evolution. The randomness of the mutation cannot be demonstrated or proved; it is simply an article of belief, no different in character from a belief that an intelligent Creator nudged the adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine bases of that DNA strand into the right order. Or that he took the clay of archaic homo sapiens and molded Adam in His own image.

At bottom the dispute between Evolutionists and Creationists always comes down to the question, “What is random?” This is the cage that Cardinal Christoph Schonborn rattled in his op-ed in the New York Times, July 7, where he wrote, “Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense — an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection — is not.” Now the director of the Vatican Observatory, Father George Coyne, has published a rebuttal in British Catholic weekly, The Tablet, neatly asserting the opposite, and accusing the cardinal of having “darkened the waters” between the Church and science.

Whether the universe is truly random or whether apparent randomness is order-not-yet-apprehended seems pretty clearly a philosophical or theological debate. It will not be settled by the editors of the Boston Globe (“Unintelligent,” editorial August 4), the vaporings of Rev. Barry Lynn from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, or the numerous respectable scientists who have stepped forward to say, “Sure enough, the universe is random.” How exactly would they know? It is not hard to suspect that beneath this ardent insistence on an unproven proposition lies simple irritation at having to share public space, including schools, with people who inexplicably continue to think that they live in a universe governed by an active God.

Middle Ground

Under the circumstances, I think the sensible middle ground lies just about where President Bush pointed. If students study biology in school, they need know a good bit about evolution with a small e. Beyond that, it wouldn’t hurt them to know about Evolution, Creation (or “Intelligent Design”) as well. I don’t carry a brief for Michael Behe, the intelligent-design proponent at Lehigh University, or the movement that he has started. But I also don’t think science is well served by elevating to the status of unquestionable truth the image of a material universe governed solely by random and otherwise inexplicable events. That’s a worldview, not a scientific conclusion, and it has no better claim to our intellectual assent than views that postulate an underlying purpose, meaning, or destination for humanity.

Actually, a line of argument that depends on seeing events as random is in a rather worse position than one that postulates, even if it can’t prove, underlying order. In science, what’s random today is frequently modeled tomorrow. To base a theory of life on ever-more-emphatic repetition of the idea that, “No, it’s random,” is a bit like stamping your foot and saying, “It’s so because I say it’s so.”

Ironically, the Creationists have come out of this recent round of controversy sounding far more open-minded than some of the scientists and the hard-core secularist advocates of Evolution-and-Nothing-But. If we had the equivalent of a Scopes trial today, I would wager Rev. Barry Lind would get to play the part of William Jennings Bryan, unwilling to think about what he is unwilling to think about.

Meanwhile, across the waters at Seoul National University, Hwang Woo-suk and his colleagues have created Snuppy, a cloned Afghan hound. Experts say the first cloning of a dog clears some technical hurdles for cloning the first human. If and when that occurs, I wonder whether cloned humans will be disposed to see themselves as products of natural selection or of intelligent design? Probably that’s a false set of alternatives. Evolution and intelligent design will have both played a role.

— Peter Wood is the author of Diversity: The Invention of A Concept.

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Kansas moves to stem role of evolution in teaching (WorldNetDaily, 050810)

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. (Reuters) - After months of debate over science and religion, the Kansas Board of Education has tentatively approved new state science standards that weaken the role evolution plays in teaching about the origin of life.

The 10-member board must still take a final vote, expected in either September or October, but a 6-4 vote on Tuesday that approved a draft of the standards essentially cemented a victory for conservative Christian board members who say evolution is largely unproven and can undermine religious teachings about the origins of life on earth.

“We think this is a great development ... for the academic freedom of students,” said John West, senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, which supports intelligent design theory.

Intelligent design proposes that some features of the natural world are best explained as products of a considered intent as opposed to a process of natural selection.

The board is sending its drafted standards to a Denver-based education consultant before a final vote, planned for either September or October.

If they win final approval, Kansas will join Minnesota, Ohio and New Mexico, all of which have adopted critical analysis of evolution in the last four years.

The new science standards would not eliminate the teaching of evolution entirely, nor would they require that religious views, also known as creationism, be taught, but it would encourage teachers to discuss various viewpoints and eliminate core evolution theory as required curriculum.

Critics say the moves are part of a continuing national effort by conservative Christians to push their secular views into the public education process.

“This is neo-creationism, trying to avoid the legal morass of trying to teach creationism overtly and slip it in through the backdoor,” said Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education.

Kansas itself has been grappling with the issue for years, garnering worldwide attention in 1999 when the state school board voted to de-emphasize evolution in science classes.

That was reversed in 2001 with new members elected to the school board. But conservatives again gained the majority in elections in 2004, leading to the newest attacks on evolution.

The science standards the board is revising act as guidelines for teachers about how and what to teach students.

In May, the board of education sponsored a courtroom-style debate over evolution that saw lawyers for each side cross-examining “witnesses” and taking up issues such as the age of the earth, fossil records and beliefs that humans and are too intricately designed to not have a creator.

The hearings came 80 years after evolution was the subject of the famous “Scopes” trial in Tennessee in which teacher John Thomas Scopes was accused of violating a ban against teaching evolution.

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Why can’t we have a rational debate (townhall.com, 050812)

Tony Snow

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Only an optimist could apply the term, “debate,” to the raging controversy over the relative merits of evolutionary theory and the concept of intelligent design, or ID. Few issues in America today stir passions as wildly as this one; few have as much power to turn otherwise sane adults into drool-flecked screamers.

Evolutionists regularly depict their ideological foes as “idiots,” “cretins,” “Bible-thumpers” and, to quote a philosophy professor at DePauw University, “morons.” The ID crowd, meanwhile, deploys its own batch of epithets, including such charmers as “bigots” and “unbelievers.”

Yet, the whole dispute dissolves if one applies a dollop of humility to each side. One just needs to ask two questions: Does science reveal truth? And, does God exist?

Consider the contending theories. Evolution posits that terrestrial life arose through a series of random genetic mutations, and that some species, adapting gradually to environmental conditions, transformed themselves into “higher” species. Hence, the well-known drawings that depict the march of primate life, from chimps to homo sapiens.

Intelligent Design claims the chances of random evolution are virtually nil. Hard science shows us a world of dazzling order, complexity and interdependence. To take one tiny example, a single gene seems to control vision in all animals. Could this be a matter of dumb luck? Physicist Steven Weinberg estimates life wouldn’t even exist if, at the instant of creation, the energy unleashed in the Big Bang had varied by one part in 10 to the 120th power. Such odds lead ID advocates to suggest that the universe didn’t get orderly by chance, but at the hand of a Designer.

These matters have been thrust into public view because some schools have begun incorporating intelligent design into science classes. Critics protest that ID is not science, but a form of philosophy or even scientistic theology. They want the idea purged from curricula, calling it an illegal introduction of religion.

This brings us back to the two threshold questions. Most people believe science unravels deep, eternal truths — that it is “perfect.” But the history of science teaches that today’s cocksure theory is tomorrow’s crackpot superstition.

A century ago, physicists boasted of having solved all the major problems involved in studying the universe. The following year, their smugness collapsed when a patent clerk named Einstein published his paper on general relativity.

Today, evolutionary theorists find themselves at wits’ end because the fossil record provides no evidence of any species ever turning into another. We know species adjust to environmental conditions — ever notice how tall kids are these days? — and that natural selection does occur. But there’s nothing to vindicate the notion of an evolutionary leap.

That said, ID does not qualify as science because it gives us nothing to test or measure. Science requires replicable tests involving measurable variables. But you can’t shake a beaker and find God. If God exists, He reveals himself through faith, not science.

These little insights give us the basis for admitting both views into the educational system. Evolutionary theory, like ID, isn’t verifiable or testable. It’s pure hypothesis — like ID — although very popular in the scientific community. Its limits help illuminate the fact that hypotheses are only as durable as the evidence that supports them.

ID is useful largely because it punctures the myth of scientific invincibility, while providing a basis for promoting the cause of “hard” science. Sure, science involves trial and error. Scientists refine theories each day. But as they do, they help us grasp more clearly the wonders of the world and the universe.

Scientific inquiry and ID provide useful angles of approach to ultimate questions. Here’s how to make both sides happy: Let science teachers tell kids that science is a matter of inspired guesswork, not of invincible decree. Eventually, new theories will arise to wipe away weaknesses and inconsistencies in today’s scientific orthodoxy.

Also, let students know that a sizeable number of scientists believe in a Designer, since science involves a quest to discover and decode universal design. (A sizeable number of scientists also don’t believe in God.) Meanwhile, issue similar warnings against silly abuses of holy writ, since scripture has little or nothing to say about matters of “hard” science.

Such cautionary notes ought to increase students’ interest in science, not to mention philosophy. A tiny touch of common sense and humility fire ambitions and imaginations by reminding students that science is a form of exploration that never runs out of frontiers and challenges — and that ever points to questions too big even for folks in lab coats to answer.

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Harvard Plans Study Questioning Evolution and the Origins of Life (Christian Post, 050816)

Harvard University is planning a scientific study on the origins of life – a move some say is proof that science has yet to disprove alternative theories to evolution, such as intelligent design.

“This is ... a stunning admission that the current theories do not explain it, and it has not refuted the idea that things are the product of intelligent cause,” said John West, a senior fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, a think tank that backs intelligent design theory, to the Associated Press.

The “Origins of Life in the Universe” study begins with the admission that some mysteries of life’s origins cannot be explained. A team of researchers, who announced Monday that they will receive $1 million in funding annually from Harvard over the next few years, will study various disciplines of biology, chemistry and astronomy to seek scientific answers to longtime questions about evolution.

The announcement comes amid a growing national debate over teaching alternatives to evolution in public schools. Last month, President George W. Bush surprised the world and satisfied religious conservatives when he said he believed intelligent design should be taught in schools along evolution so people can better understand the different sides to the argument.

Intelligent design supports the theory that nature is so complex, it could not have occurred by random natural selection, as held by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, so the universe must be the work of an intelligent agent.

Opponents of Intelligent design have dubbed it “the brainchild of creationism,” but advocates have stressed a core difference that could make it much more palatable to the scientific community: creationism starts with the Bible, but Intelligent Design starts with nature. Furthermore, intelligent design is compatible to evolution since it does not rule out the process of evolution as part of a larger intelligent plan.

Harvard spokesman B.D. Colen said the project was not in response to the debate over intelligent design, but did admit the core questions about life had yet to be answered.

“This is not something that began recently or something that began in reaction to what’s going on in the larger environment,” said Harvard spokesman Colen. “It’s a project that began because scientists are seeking answers to some of the biggest questions ever posed.”

Harvard’s “Origins of Life in the Universe” is still in its early stages and will raise money from other organizations.

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Evolutionists in Panic—What’s Going on at The New Republic? (Christian Post, 050819)

What’s going on at The New Republic? The current issue of the magazine features two broadside attacks on the movement known as Intelligent Design [ID], and the magazine’s online edition adds a third. The articles are filled with rhetoric, vitriol, and urgency. Clearly, panic is setting in in some quarters—and that panic is over evolution.

In the August 22 edition of the magazine, literary editor Leon Wieseltier sets the stage by attacking Intelligent Design as “an expression of sentiment, not an exercise of reason.” In the online edition, reporter Ross Douthat argues that Intelligent Design “will run out of steam—a victim of its own grand ambitions.” Then, the magazine offers a massive article and book review by Jerry Coyne, a professor at the University of Chicago. All this seems a bit much if the magazine’s editors really believe that Intelligent Design is about to run out of steam.

Coyne writes the cover story for the magazine, placing Intelligent Design and other criticisms of evolution in what he sees as their places—far outside the mainstream of what he considers intelligent thought. A faculty member of the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Chicago, Coyne argues that Intelligent Design is simply the latest form of creationism, albeit a disguised form that constitutes a subtle political threat to the dominant scientific worldview. He argues that “Christian fundamentalist creationism has undergone its own evolution, taking on newer forms after absorbing repeated blows from the courts.” As he sees it, Intelligent Design “is merely the latest incarnation of the biblical creationism espoused by William Jennings Bryan in Dayton.” Lest anyone miss his point, Coyne then asserts: “Far from a respectable scientific alternative to evolution, it is a clever attempt to sneak religion, cloaked in the guise of science, into the public schools.”

Like many scientists fervently committed to evolutionary theory, Coyne demonstrates frustration and perplexity when confronted with the reality that so many millions of Americans reject the theory. By any measure, Coyne is a confident and assertive proponent of evolution, willing to argue that we should now know evolutionary theory to be true. “We have known for a long time that the Earth is 4.6 billion years old . . . and that species were not created suddenly or simultaneously (not only do most species go extinct, but various groups appear at different times in the fossil record) and we have ample evidence for species’ changing over time, as well as for fossils that illustrate large morphological transformations.”

Efforts to legislate curbs on evolutionary teaching in the public schools are, in Coyne’s view, evidence of a basic anti-intellectualism among the American people. Beyond this, he consistently asserts that opposition to evolution must be a disguised form of religious argument.

Coyne’s article provides an interesting perspective into the mind of those scientists and proponents of evolutionary theory who simply will not accept any acknowledgement that evolution remains a controversial issue among the American people.

When schools in several states decided to paste warning stickers on biology textbooks, proponents of evolution immediately took to the courts. Just this year, a federal judge ordered stickers removed from biology textbooks in Cobb County, Georgia. The stickers had read: “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.” One might think that evolutionists, if truly confident of their theory, would see these stickers as nothing like a threat to their dominance in the academy. Not so.

As Coyne argues, “By singling out evolution as uniquely controversial among scientific theories, the stickers catered to religious biases and thus violated the First Amendment.” Talk about a stretch of logic. Furthermore, Coyne’s statement is a blithe effort to ignore the obvious—that evolution is “uniquely controversial among scientific theories,” at least among the American people.

In Coyne’s rather conspiratorial version of the controversy’s history, creationists simply came up with Intelligent Design after all else failed. “They are animated, after all, by faith,” he explains. “And they are very resourceful.”

Coyne’s potshots follow the usual pattern of scientific condescension. Intelligent Design is dismissed as “the latest pseudoscientific incarnation of religious creationism, cleverly crafted by a new group of enthusiasts to circumvent recent legal restrictions.” Evolution, he argues, is both “a theory and a fact.” He adds: “It makes as little sense to doubt the factuality of evolution as to doubt the factuality of gravity.”

Opponents of Intelligent Design who wish to come into the real world for a moment will recognize the limitations of such claims. After all, gravity, though unseen, fits naturally into the worldview of most conscious persons, who observe the operation of gravity on a daily basis and find the “theory” of gravity to be an intellectually satisfying way of explaining the world they observe. This is hardly the case with the theory of evolution.

Coyne certainly has no lack of confidence in evolutionary theory. After describing the dominant neo-Darwinian account of evolution, he then offers several paragraphs of “proof” for the theory. “And so evolution has graduated from theory to fact,” he asserts. “We know the species on Earth today descended from earlier, different species, and that every pair of species had a common ancestor that existed in the past. Most evolutionary change in the features of organisms, moreover, is almost certainly the result of natural selection. But we must also remember that, like all scientific truths, the truth of evolution is provisional: it could conceivably be overturned by future investigations. It is possible (but unlikely!) that we could find human fossils co-existing with dinosaurs, or fossils of birds living alongside those of the earliest invertebrates 600 million years ago. Either observation would sink neo-Darwinism for good.” Coyne sees the theory as safe, secure, and satisfying.

So why are so many persons drawn to the theory of Intelligent Design? More broadly, why do so many persons reject the theory of evolution? Coyne doesn’t even see the universe as offering an appearance of design. Instead, he sees only evidence of what would be an incompetent designer. “Organisms simply do not look as if they have been intelligently designed,” he asserts. “Would an intelligent designer create millions of species and then make them go extinct, only to replace them with other species, repeating this process over and over again?” If so, the intelligent designer must be “a cosmic prankster.”

But if Coyne misses the attraction of Intelligent Design—and fails to understand why so many Americans have such an aversion to evolutionary theory—Ross Douthat thinks that he gets it. “The appeal of ‘Intelligent Design’ to the American right is obvious. For religious conservatives, the theory promises to uncover God’s fingerprints on the building blocks of life. For conservative intellectuals in general, it offers hope that Darwinism will yet join Marxism and Freudianism in the dustbin of pseudoscience.”

Nevertheless, Douthat sees Intelligent Design as a potential “political boom for liberals, and a poisoned chalice for conservatives.”

Extending the debate over evolution to the nation’s Culture War, Douthat argues that the evolution wars allow liberals “the opportunity to portray every scientific battle—today, stem-cell research, ‘therapeutic’ cloning, and end-of-life issues; tomorrow, perhaps, large-scale genetic engineering—as a face-off between scientific rigor and religious fundamentalism.” The embrace of Intelligent Design on the part of many conservatives “reshapes the ideological battlefield,” Douthat argues, helping “liberals cast the debate as an argument about science, rather than morality, and paint their enemies as a collection of book-burning, Galileo-silencing fanatics.” We have been warned.

But it is Leon Wieseltier who takes the argument to the next level. Of the three articles, Wieseltier’s is the most acerbic, dismissive, and revealing. After all, Wieseltier argues that intelligent persons must not only reject Intelligent Design, but what he describes as any “literal” belief in the Bible.

As Wieseltier styles the issue, Intelligent Design “is a psalm, not a proof.” Here’s how he sets the issue: “The problem is that the cosmology in Genesis does not resemble what we know about the origins of the world. Which is to say, Intelligent Design was prompted by the consequences of literalism in the interpretation of Scripture. Now, there is no more primitive form of monotheistic religion than this. If you believe that the world was created by God in six days because the Bible says so, then you must also believe that the Israelites saw God’s hand, because the Bible says so, and that Moses spoke to God face to face, because the Bible says so, and that God’s feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, because the Bible says so, and so on. The intellectual integrity of monotheism depends upon the repudiation of such readings. Sanctity is not an excuse for stupidity.”

Now, he certainly put those who believe the Bible to be true in our place, didn’t he? Wieseltier’s tactic is to style any understanding that the Bible conveys actual truth claims as “literalism,” which must be dismissed by all right-thinking people.

Wieseltier’s article is helpful because it underlines the anti-supernaturalistic bias that stands behind the intellectual condescensions of the intellectual elite. “I do not mean to gloat,” Wieseltier insists. “If you were raised on Scripture as a child, if the Bible was your first enchantment, then it is not an easy matter to pull slightly away, to confer upon your improvising intellect so much power over its significations.” He continues: “There really is something childish about the notion that everything is exactly as the Bible says it is: this is the spell of fairytales.”

Wieseltier has been liberated from such “fairytales” and now encourages all thick-headed literalists to follow his example. Note carefully that Wieseltier’s rejection of biblical “literalism” goes far beyond a denial of six day creationism. Indeed, he rejects a literal understanding of all Scripture. It’s just poetry, after all.

Perhaps the most important lesson offered by this hyperbolic issue of The New Republic is the fact that the intellectual elite is directly threatened by the persistence of those who reject evolution. These three articles may represent intellectual condescension at its worst, but they also demonstrate intellectual anxiety. Someone has hit the panic button.

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R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

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Senate Leader Agrees With Bush, Favors Intelligent Design in Schools (Christian Post, 050820)

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said he was for teaching “intelligent design” along with evolution in public schools, two days after defending his recent choice to push for the expansion of federal funding for stem cell research.

The senator made the comments on Thursday while visiting a Rotary Club meeting in Nashville, Tenn., where he said that students should be exposed to varying ideas.

“I think today a pluralistic society should have access to a broad range of fact, of science, including faith,” he said according to the Associated Press. “I think having kids exposed to both doesn’t force any particular theory on anyone. I think in a pluralistic society that is the fairest way to go about education and training people for the future.”

Recently, Intelligent Design has been gaining more attention due to earlier comments made by President Bush endorsing the teaching of the theory and recent Kansas State Board of Education meetings where administrators agreed to let the science curriculum be more critical of evolution.

At a round-table discussion with Texas reporters in early August, Bush endorsed the teaching of Intelligent Design “so people can understand what the debate is about.”

Intelligent Design is a theory that states that some aspects of nature are so complex that they could not have been created by evolution and posits an intelligent creative agent that guides the process. Although the theory does not explicitly speak about God, some have said it leaves the door open to include a Divine guiding hand.

Critics of Intelligent Design say that the theory is merely religious creationism in the guise of science.

Frist’s comments on Thursday regarding the issue were made as he traveled throughout his state this week, speaking to constituents. Earlier this week, he defended his support for increased funding for embryonic stem cell research – a move that rankled conservative Christians who believe that the destruction of embryos to harvest stem cells is an affront to life equivalent to abortion.

The senator stated on Tuesday that he only supports the additional research on embryos that were to have been discarded anyway, adding that he would not support creating embryos specifically for research.

He has also maintained that his stance does not contradict his pro-life views.

Some Christian groups, including the Christian Defense Coalition, however, have said that the Senator “cannot have it both ways” by saying he is pro-life, while allowing the destruction of embryos in order to harvest stem cells.

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Darwin’s Rottweiler—Richard Dawkins Speaks His Mind (Christian Post, 050909)

Richard Dawkins is one of the world’s most recognizable and influential intellectual figures. His books on evolutionary theory and modern science have sold millions of copies, and he is one of the most quotable thinkers in modern science. Of course, he is also one of the most aggressive secularists of the age—and that’s what makes him an important focus of Christian interest.

Now serving as the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, Dawkins was born in Nairobi, Kenya where his father was a farmer involved in the colonial service. As a young boy, Dawkins moved with his parents to England, where he was educated in that country’s elite system of boarding schools and universities. He eventually graduated with a degree in zoology from Balliol College, Oxford, and then earned a masters degree and the doctorate from Oxford University. His rise to public prominence came as he served as a lecturer in zoology at Oxford University from 1970-1990. His 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, became one of the most influential scientific texts of modern times. Dawkins argued that the fundamental unit of natural selection was not the individual but genes. In effect, Dawkins redefined evolutionary theory by suggesting that the “selfish gene” was the basic engine of evolutionary development—explaining how various “survival machines” perpetuate species and evolutionary development. A succession of other best-selling popular books defending evolution gave Dawkins and his ideas even wider influence and greater popularity. By the time he assumed his endowed chair at Oxford University in 1995, Dawkins was one of the most oft-quoted figures in modern science.

What makes Dawkins of particular interest to Christians is his aggressive and undisguised secularism. Dawkins is a committed atheist—an atheist with the zeal to convince those who believe of the error of their ways. As a public figure, Dawkins is almost unchallenged as a proponent of an aggressive secularist agenda. In one sense, he simply says out loud what others are undoubtedly thinking. His aggressiveness and abrasiveness have now prompted some of his fellow defenders of evolution to wonder if he is doing their cause more harm than good.

The September 2005 issue of Discover magazine features an article that raises this very question. In “Darwin’s Rottweiler,” author Stephen S. Hall suggests that Dawkins is simply “far too fierce.”

Given contemporary debates over evolutionary theory and intelligent design, and given the reality that much of this debate is directed towards a public audience, both sides understand that much is at stake in the terms and character of the public debate. This explains why many of Dawkins’ colleagues are now concerned about his approach.

In his fascinating article, Hall attempts to present Dawkins in the best possible light. He is introduced as being “unfailingly gracious” in person, “a constrained version of the witty, expansive, passionate, and intellectually provocative persona that animates the pages of his books.” Hall also suggests that Dawkins is a gifted writer and wordsmith who gives dedicated attention to “the precise manner in which he builds an argument, organizes an essay, or demolishes the wobbly logic of a rival in debate.”

Nevertheless, “There is nothing affected or dainty or quaint about the way Dawkins communicates science.” Indeed, “An unabashed atheist and avidly polemical public intellectual, he has employed a scorched-earth vocabulary to take on religion, the evangelical right, Muslim fundamentalism, parochial education, and the faith-based political philosophy of George W. Bush.” That’s quite a considerable agenda, but no one can doubt that Richard Dawkins gives himself fully to this intellectual combat.

It was Oxford theologian Alister McGrath who first identified Dawkins as “Darwin’s Rottweiler.” The label has stuck because Dawkins plays the part so well.

Dawkins admits that he just may be “a bit of a loose canon.” In reality, that is a significant understatement. Nevertheless, the very force and caustic quality of Dawkins’ arguments help to frame the limited intellectual alternatives that are presented in the conflict between Christianity and evolutionary theory.

Put simply, Dawkins is absolutely convinced that the theory of evolution spells the doom of all belief in God. Even if he reserves his greatest energy for attacking conservative Christians, he clearly has no respect for more liberal Christians who claim to be able to reconcile evolution and belief in God. “What I can’t understand is why we are expected to show respect for good scientists, even great scientists, who at the same time believe in a god who does things like listen to our prayers, forgive our sins, perform cheap miracles which go against, presumably, everything that the God of the physicists, the Divine Cosmologist, set up when he set up his great laws of nature,” Dawkins explains. “So I don’t understand a scientist who says ‘I’m a Roman Catholic’ or ‘I’m a Baptist.’”

Last October, Dawkins participated in a meeting sponsored by the New York Institute for the Humanities. As a participant on a panel dealing with spirituality and science, Dawkins drew clear and unmistakable boundaries between science and theism. The only spirituality Dawkins can respect is a science-based spirituality that simply recognizes the wonder of the universe and the imponderables of its complexity. Dawkins associates this kind of spirituality with Albert Einstein, and he argued that this science-based form of spirituality is not “somehow less than supernatural religion.”

Christians should pay close attention to Dawkins at this point. Dawkins warns that when many scientists speak of God, they are actually speaking of nothing more than a scientific sense of wonder.

Dawkins has made this argument over and over again. Writing in Forbes ASAP magazine in 1999, Dawkins addressed the question of a convergence between science and religion. “There are modern scientists whose words sound religious but whose beliefs, on close examination, turn out to be identical to those of other scientists who call themselves atheists,” he asserted. He pointed to a book by scientist Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature, and rightly observed that Goodenough has evidently redefined the terms of the sacred. Even though she claimed the book was about religion, and even as theologians endorse the book on its back cover, Dawkins observed: “Yet, by the book’s own account, Goodenough does not believe in any sort of supreme being, does not believe in any sort of life after death. By any normal understanding of the English language, she is no more religious than I am.”

As Dawkins continued: “If you count Einstein and [Stephen] Hawking as religious, if you allow the cosmic awe of Goodenough, [Paul] Davies, [Carl] Sagan and me as true religion, then religion and science have indeed merged, especially when you factor in such atheistic priests as Don Cupitt and many university chaplains. But if the term religion is allowed such a flabbily elastic definition, what word is left for conventional religion, religion as the ordinary person in the pew or on the prayer mat understands it today—indeed, as any intellectual would have understood it in previous centuries, when intellectuals were religious like everybody else?”

That kind of candor is what makes Dawkins’ colleagues so uncomfortable. At the New York Symposium, Dawkins went on the attack, criticizing Brown University professor Ken Miller for claiming to believe in evolutionary theory and in God. The exchange was so heated that the gathered scientists—more accustomed to low-key debate, found themselves aghast. As Hall observed, “The other thing that struck me was the tone of the debate—Dawkins, and his undeniably civil manner, was so aggressive, so relentless, and so pitiless towards his intellectual adversaries that it almost detracted from the quality of his argument.”

Hall’s concern is not that Dawkins might be wrong—he seems to agree that Dawkins is fundamentally correct. Instead, Hall reflects a growing discomfort among scientists that Dawkins and his aggressive approach are making the case for evolution harder to defend in the marketplace of ideas. “You can be the world’s greatest apostle of scientific rationalism,” Hall warns, “but if you come across as a Rottweiler, Darwin’s or anybody else’s, when you enter that marketplace, it’s very hard to make the sale.”

Hall certainly makes a fascinating point. During the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, Dawkins joined with several other liberal British intellectuals in writing a famous series of letters to voters in Clark County, Ohio. Understood as a key swing county in the election, the British newspaper The Guardian suggested that British citizens should write letters to Clark County residents urging them to vote for John Kerry. Dawkins gladly participated in the project, writing the Ohioans in a tone that was caustic and condescending. He warned that if George Bush was reelected President of the United States, “that would be the time for Americans traveling abroad to simulate a Canadian accent.” He referred to the American President as “an amiable idiot” and worse. “An idiot he may be,” Dawkins asserted, “but he is also sly, mendacious, and vindictive.”

The end result? Clark County, Ohio became the only county in that state that, having voted for Al Gore in the 2000 election, switched to Bush in 2004.

Time will tell if Dawkins has a similar long-term impact on the debate over evolution. Nevertheless, Christians should note with care that Dawkins makes a point on which serious Christians and evolutionary theorists can agree—that the conflict between the worldview of Christianity and the worldview of evolutionary naturalism represents a clash between mutually exclusive understandings of reality. As Hall suggests, this “may be the ultimate culture war of our time, because it underlines fundamental and mutually exclusive visions of the path toward truth.”

For this reason, Richard Dawkins deserves Christian interest and intellectual engagement. In the person of this Oxford professor, Christians face an intellectual foe who is far more honest, if also more aggressive, than his ideological colleagues. We are indeed engaged in a battle of ideas, and the outcome of this intellectual struggle will bring incalculable cultural consequences. In these strange and confusing times, Christians would do well to think seriously about the arguments offered by one of the world’s most honest atheists.

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R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

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Pennsylvania School District to Defend Policy on Intelligent Design (Christian Post, 050919)

The Dover Area School district in Pennsylvania will soon defend its policy to require ninth grade students to hear a short statement about “intelligent design” before biology lessons on evolution.

Dover is believed to have been the first school system in the nation to require students to hear about the controversial concept. The school adopted the policy in October 2004, after which teachers were required to read a statement that says intelligent design is different that Darwin’s theory of evolution and refers students to a text book on intelligent design to get more in formation.

“All the Dover school board did was allow students to get a glimpse of a controversy that is really boiling over in the scientific community,” said Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, which is defending the school district, according to the Associated Press.

The civil trial is set to take place on Sept. 26 and will only be the latest chapter in a long-running legal debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools.

The controversy over intelligent design in public schools has received national attention with statements by President Bush expressing approval for the theory to be taught in class, along with the recent approval by the Kansas Board of Education to give preliminary approval to science standards that allow criticism of evolution.

Intelligent design theory states that some parts of the natural world are so complex that the most reasonable explanation is that they were made as products of an intelligent cause, rather than random mutation and natural selection.

In contrast to “creationism,” which states specifically that God is the creator, intelligent design is more general, simply saying that life did not come about by chance. The “designer” could be anything or anyone, though many place God in the position of the designer.

Experts on the case include biochemist Michael Behe of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, who is proponent of intelligent design. He holds that the concept of “irreducible complexity” shows that there is an intelligent creator. He cites the example of a bacterial flagellum, an appendage to a bacterium that allows it to move about.

“Whenever we see such complex, functional mechanical systems, we always infer that they were designed. ... It is a conclusion based on physical evidence,” AP reported Behe as saying in testimony before the state legislative panel in June where he was asked to talk about intelligent design.

Critics of intelligent design have dismissed the theory as a backdoor to creationism, with some calling it pseudo science.

In a 1999 assessment of intelligent design, the National Academy of sciences said the theory was not science.

“Creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science,” the NAS stated.

The controversy over Intelligent Design has been so highly talked about that the debate was also featured last month as a cover story for Time Magazine. In the feature article, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) President Albert Mohler, Jr., tackled the controversy with three other scholars in a forum addressing the question “Can You Believe in God and Evolution?” Behe was also among those whose views were addressed in the article.

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Cardinal backs evolution and “intelligent design” (Reuters, 051004)

PARIS (Reuters) - A senior Roman Catholic cardinal seen as a champion of “intelligent design” against Darwin’s explanation of life has described the theory of evolution as “one of the very great works of intellectual history.”

Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn said he could believe both in divine creation and in evolution because one was a question of religion and the other of science, two realms that complimented rather than contradicted each other.

Schoenborn’s view, presented in a lecture published by his office on Tuesday, tempered earlier statements that seemed to ally the Church with United States conservatives campaigning against the teaching of evolution in public schools.

A court in Pennsylvania is now hearing a suit brought by parents against a school district that teaches intelligent design — the view that life is so complex some higher being must have designed it — alongside evolution in biology class.

“Without a doubt, Darwin pulled off quite a feat with his main work and it remains one of the very great works of intellectual history,” Schoenborn declared in a lecture in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna on Sunday.

“I see no problem combining belief in the Creator with the theory of evolution, under one condition — that the limits of a scientific theory are respected,” he said.

Science studies what is observable and scientists overstep the boundaries of their discipline when they conclude evolution proves there was no creator, said the cardinal, 60, a top Church doctrinal expert and close associate of Pope Benedict.

“It is fully reasonable to assume some sense or design even if the scientific method demands restrictions that shut out this question,” said the cardinal.

JUST A MISUNDERSTANDING?

Schoenborn, who ranked among the papal hopefuls last April, caused an uproar in the United States last July with a New York Times article that seemed to say the Church no longer accepted evolution and backed intelligent design.

Proponents of intelligent design argue that Darwin’s natural selection theory is flawed and alternatives should be taught.

Scientists reject this as a disguised form of Creationism, the literal belief in Creation as described in the Bible and barred by the U.S. Supreme Court from being taught in public schools.

Even Catholic scientists, including chief Vatican astronomer Rev. George Coyne S.J., contested Schoenborn’s view.

In his lecture, Schoenborn said his article had led to misunderstandings and sometimes polemics. “Maybe one did not express oneself clearly enough or thoughts were not clear enough,” he said. “Such misunderstandings can be cleared up.”

Schoenborn said he believed God created “the things of the world” but did not explain how a divine will to bring about mankind would have influenced its actual evolution.

“They were so to speak let free into their own existence,” he said.

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Feds fund religious promotion of evolution: Darwin defender sued for website warning of ‘conservative Christians’ (WorldNetDaily, 051013)

In a turning of tables, two defenders of evolution in academia are being sued for spending more than $500,000 of federal money on a website that encourages teachers to use religion to promote Darwin’s theory.

California parent Jeanne Caldwell filed the suit yesterday against the National Science Foundation and the University of California at Berkeley.

“In this stunning example of hypocrisy, the same people who so loudly proclaim that they oppose discussion of religion in science classes are clamoring for public school teachers to expressly use theology in order to convince students to support evolution,” said Larry Caldwell, president of Quality Science Education for All, who is co-counsel in the suit with the Pacific Justice Institute.

As WorldNetDaily reported, Caldwell also has filed a civil-rights lawsuit in federal court against the Roseville Joint Union High School District and school officials in Sacramento, Calif., alleging his constitutional rights to free speech, equal protection and religious freedom were violated when he was prevented from introducing a curriculum that includes some of the scientific weaknesses of Darwin’s theory of evolution in biology classes, without introducing religious content.

In April, Caldwell sued the Oakland, Calif.-based National Center for Science Education claiming an article by director Eugenie Scott contained numerous factual misstatements and libeled him in an effort to discredit efforts to promote his curriculum.

The website at the center of the current lawsuit, called “Understanding Evolution,” directs teachers to doctrinal statements by 17 religious denominations and groups endorsing evolutionary theory.

A statement by the United Church of Christ, for example, declares that evolution is consistent with “the revelation and presence of ... God in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.”

The website further suggests classroom activities that explicitly use religion to promote evolution, the lawsuit asserts.

In one suggested activity, teachers are to share with students statements by religious leaders on evolution, but only those “stress[ing] the compatibility of theology with the science of evolution.”

In another activity, students are assigned to interview ministers about their views on evolution, with the purpose of showing students “Evolution is OK!”

Teachers are cautioned, however, that this particular activity may not work if they live in a community that is “conservative Christian.”

“While the government has a legitimate purpose in educating students about the science of evolution, it’s outrageous that tax dollars would be spent to indoctrinate students into a particular religious view of evolution,” said plaintiff Jeanne Caldwell.

“There are many different religious views about evolution,” she added. “How dare the government tell students which religious view is correct! This is propaganda, not education.”

The lawsuit alleges the state and federal government are promoting religious beliefs to minor school children through the website in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion … .”

The suit seeks to remove “these government endorsed religious beliefs” from the website.

The lawsuit also alleges the website is being used to further the religious agenda of Scott’s National Center for Science Education, which has a “long history of religious advocacy” on the evolution issue.

According to the suit, the NCSE, which helped design the website, provides religious “outreach” programs and “preaching” on evolution to churches, all aimed at convincing people of faith that there is no conflict between their religious beliefs and evolution.

“It turns out that the NCSE and its allies in the scientific and educational establishments don’t mind having religious beliefs discussed in science class, as long as those discussions are aimed at convincing students to convert to the religious beliefs favored by the NCSE,” said attorney Caldwell. “Their willingness to flagrantly violate students’ constitutionally protected religious freedoms in order to sell evolution to our children is the height of hypocrisy.”

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God beats evolution in new CBS survey: Poll indicates majority think Creator made human beings (WorldNetDaily, 051025)

A new poll by CBS News indicates when it comes to the origin of men and women, most Americans reject the theory of evolution and believe they were created by God.

According to the survey, “51% say God created humans in their present form, and another three in 10 say that while humans evolved, God guided the process. Just 15% say humans evolved, and that God was not involved.”

Participants were given three options from which to choose about origins:

1. Human beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years, and God did not directly guide this process;

2. Human beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years, but God guided this process;

3. God created human beings in their present form.

The results indicate those most likely to believe in only evolution are liberals (36%), those who rarely or never attend church services (25%), and those with at least a college degree (24%).

Most Americans, by a 67-29% margin, think it’s possible to believe in both God and evolution.

The survey was taken via telephone from a nationwide random sample of 808 adults Oct. 3-5, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4%.

In the wake of the CBS poll, America Online is conducting a similar interactive poll.

When asked “How were humans created?” participants in the unscientific survey responded:

# By evolution alone: 37%;

# By God in our present form: 32%

# By evolution, with God’s guidance: 31%.

AOL also asked “Is it possible to believe in both God and evolution?”

With 105,000 respondents, 70% said yes, while 30% said no.

“How can anyone disagree with evolution with so much evidence out there?” asked one AOL user in an associated messageboard. “I don’t see any evidence of how God got here.”

“Did God create liberals?” asks another. “No. Liberals clearly evolved, by accident, from apes. Dumb apes. The average American liberal shows no hint of intelligent design. No wonder liberals are pro-Darwin.”

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Kansas State Board Approves Teaching Standards Skeptical of Evolution (Foxnews, 051108)

TOPEKA, Kan. — Risking the kind of nationwide ridicule it faced six years ago, the Kansas Board of Education approved new public-school science standards Tuesday that cast doubt on the theory of evolution.

The 6-4 vote was a victory for “intelligent design” advocates who helped draft the standards. Intelligent design holds that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power.

Critics of the new language charged that it was an attempt to inject God and creationism into public schools in violation of the separation of church and state.

All six of those who voted for the new standards were Republicans. Two Republicans and two Democrats voted no.

“This is a sad day. We’re becoming a laughingstock of not only the nation, but of the world, and I hate that,” said board member Janet Waugh, a Kansas City Democrat.

Supporters of the new standards said they will promote academic freedom. “It gets rid of a lot of dogma that’s being taught in the classroom today,” said board member John Bacon, an Olathe Republican.

The new standards say high school students must understand major evolutionary concepts. But they also declare that the basic Darwinian theory that all life had a common origin and that natural chemical processes created the building blocks of life have been challenged in recent years by fossil evidence and molecular biology.

In addition, the board rewrote the definition of science, so that it is no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena.

The new standards will be used to develop student tests measuring how well schools teach science. Decisions about what is taught in classrooms will remain with 300 local school boards, but some educators fear pressure will increase in some communities to teach less about evolution or more about creationism or intelligent design.

The vote marked the third time in six years that the Kansas board has rewritten standards with evolution as the central issue.

In 1999, the board eliminated most references to evolution. Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould said that was akin to teaching “American history without Lincoln.”

Two years later, after voters replaced three members, the board reverted to evolution-friendly standards. Elections in 2002 and 2004 changed the board’s composition again, making it more conservative.

The latest vote likely to bring fresh national criticism to Kansas and cause many scientists to see the state as backward. Many scientists and other critics contend creationists repackaged old ideas in new, scientific-sounding language to get around a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1987 against teaching the biblical story of creation in public schools.

The Kansas board’s action is part of a national debate. In Pennsylvania, a judge is expected to rule soon in a lawsuit against the Dover school board’s policy of requiring high school students to learn about intelligent design in biology class. In August, President Bush endorsed teaching intelligent design alongside evolution.

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Vatican Astronomer: Intelligent Design Not Science (Foxnews, 051118)

[Comment by Kwing Hung: The Vatican is insensitive to the debate and unadvertently provides ammunition for atheists. Aweful!]

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican’s chief astronomer said Friday that “intelligent design” isn’t science and doesn’t belong in science classrooms, becoming the latest high-ranking Roman Catholic official to enter the evolution debate in the United States.

The Rev. George Coyne, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, said placing intelligent design theory alongside that of evolution in school programs was “wrong” and was akin to mixing apples with oranges.

“Intelligent design isn’t science, even though it pretends to be,” the ANSA news agency quoted Coyne as saying on the sidelines of a conference in Florence. “If you want to teach it in schools, intelligent design should be taught when religion or cultural history is taught, not science.”

His comments were in line with his previous statements on “intelligent design,” whose supporters hold that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power.

Proponents of intelligent design are seeking to get public schools in the United States to teach it as part of the science curriculum. Critics say intelligent design is merely creationism — a literal reading of the Bible’s story of creation — camouflaged in scientific language, and they say it does not belong in science curriculum.

In a June article in the British Catholic magazine The Tablet, Coyne reaffirmed God’s role in creation, but said science explains the history of the universe.

“If they respect the results of modern science, and indeed the best of modern biblical research, religious believers must move away from the notion of a dictator God or a designer God, a Newtonian God who made the universe as a watch that ticks along regularly.”

Rather, he argued, God should be seen more as an encouraging parent.

“God in his infinite freedom continuously creates a world that reflects that freedom at all levels of the evolutionary process to greater and greater complexity,” he wrote. “He is not continually intervening, but rather allows, participates, loves.”

The Vatican Observatory, which Coyne heads, is one of the oldest astronomical research institutions in the world. It is based in the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo south of Rome.

Last week, Pope Benedict XVI waded indirectly into the evolution debate by saying the universe was made by an “intelligent project” and criticizing those who in the name of science say its creation was without direction or order.

Questions about the Vatican’s position on evolution were raised in July by Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn.

In a New York Times column, Schoenborn seemed to back intelligent design and dismissed a 1996 statement by Pope John Paul II that evolution was “more than just a hypothesis.” Schoenborn said the late pope’s statement was “rather vague and unimportant.”

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Creationism, Intelligent Design Course Withdrawn Over Offensive Remarks (Christian Post, 051205)

A controversial course about creationism and intelligent design at the University of Kansas was cancelled by the professor who was to teach it, following publicized e-mail messages he wrote mocking Christian fundamentalists.

Professor Paul Mirecki, chairman of religious studies, had planned to teach a spring 2006 course initially titled “Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and Other Religious Mythologies.”

Under pressure following complaints, he removed the reference to mythology but on Thursday, he said that teaching the course had become “untenable” due to the controversy over e-mail messages he had sent through the discussion forum moderated by a student atheists and agnostics campus group for which he served as a faculty adviser.

In a statement released by the University of Kansas on Thursday, Mirecki apologized for the e-mail messages posted since 2003 on a Yahoo list-serv discussion board. In one message, he referred to Christian fundamentalists as “fundies,” adding that the course would be a “nice slap in their big fat face.”

“I made a mistake in not leading by example, in this student organization e-mail forum, the importance of discussing differing viewpoints in a civil and respectful manner,” wrote Mirecki, in the released statement.

A response to the professor’s statement was issued in the same release by University Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor David Shulenburger, who agreed to drop the course but felt it had merit and should be taught at a later date.

“While the e-mails were unquestionably offensive, I know that Professor Mirecki regrets the situation he created,” stated Shulenburger, adding that Mirecki had taught biblical studies for 16 years at the university, and had an international reputation for his work. He hoped that Mirecki would continue his work.

University Chancellor Robert Hemenway also issued at statement in response to Mirecki’s withdrawal of the course, describing Mirecki’s e-mail comments as “repugnant and vile.”

“They do not represent my views nor the views of this university,” Hemenway stated. “People of all faiths are valued at KU, and campus ministries are an important part of life at the university.”

Hemenway did, however, note that the “unfortunate episode does not in any way diminish our belief that the course should be taught.”

“It is the role of the university to take on such topics and to provide the civil, academic environment in which they can be honestly examined and discussed,” he stated.

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Don’t Fear the Designer: Competing philosophies and beliefs. (National Review Online, 051201)

My new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, addresses many topics, ranging from endangered species to the alleged warfare of religion and science. But two in particular have repeatedly come up in radio interviews: global warming and intelligent design (I have chapters on both).

Most on the Right are agreed on global warming: It’s mostly politics dressed up as science. But what about intelligent design? [comments by Kwing Hung: global warming is still disputed. Recent research evidence shows that the earth was much warmer 10,000 years ago, as seen from a TV documentary of analyzing polar ice.]

On this, conservatives are divided. Many — dare I call them the rank and file? — are skeptical about evolution and, I sense, are willing to throw it overboard. Others — I’ll call them the chattering class — think things have gone too far, and that when it comes to evolution we should show Harvard and Yale a little more respect.

George Will recently said that the Kansas Board of Education (which on Election Day voted to amend science standards in favor of intelligent design) is controlled “by the kind of conservatives who make conservatism repulsive to temperate people.” Charles Krauthammer, too, wants to read evolution skeptics out of polite society.

But more than snobbish disdain will be needed to deal with the facts and arguments put forward by the proponents of intelligent design.

George Will tells us that evolution is a fact. Is it? It depends on what you mean by evolution. Add an antibiotic to a dish of bacteria, so that some die and some survive, and bacterial resistance may be seen. This is said to illustrate natural selection — Charles Darwin’s great discovery and claim to fame — and, therefore, evolution in action. Charles Krauthammer is pleased to tell us that the advocates of intelligent design “admit” that natural selection “explains such things as the development of drug resistance.”

Petri Politics

But what actually happens in the Petri dish? Some of the bacteria are naturally equipped with enzymes that give them immunity to the antibiotic. So they survive, while most of the bacteria die. Nutrients remain in the dish, and the resistant strain now has an ample food supply and multiplies. Before, it could hardly compete with the far more abundant strain, now wiped out. So the (pre-existing) resistant strain becomes more numerous. There is a multiplication of something that already existed. But as the famous geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan said about 100 years ago — he spent years studying fruit flies at Columbia University and was rewarded with the Nobel Prize — evolution means making new things, not more of what already exists.

Nonetheless, if you define evolution as a change of gene ratios, well, yes, there has been such a change of ratios in the population of bacteria. So, if your definition of evolution is sufficiently modest, then you can call evolution a fact. Others define evolution as “change over time.” That’s a fact, too.

But we know perfectly well that, to its devotees, evolution means something much more than that.

We are expected to believe — and I do mean believe — that evolution answers the important question: How did life, in all its abundance, appear on Earth? By the slow, successive modification of pre-existing forms, Darwin said. Go back far enough, to one of those warm little ponds Darwinians assume must have existed, and we would find that life started of its own accord from nothing in particular. Over the eons, atoms and molecules whirled themselves into ever more complicated structures. Eventually the best and brightest acquired consciousness, and started to ask: “How did we get here?” The usual answer was: “We seem to have been intelligently designed.” Then others replied: “Oh, no, no, no, we all started in a warm little pond, way back.”

Just the Facts

Whom to believe? Or maybe we should approach it more scientifically: What are the facts?

If we discount trivial examples like bacterial resistance or “change over time” or small changes in beak size among the finches of the Galapagos Islands, we don’t know very much about evolution at all. We don’t see it happening around us, or in the rocks.

In my book, I quote Colin Patterson, a senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, telling a professional audience at the American Museum in New York that there was “not one thing” he knew about evolution. He had asked the evolutionary-morphology seminar at the University of Chicago if there was anything they knew about it, and, he said: “The only answer I got was silence.”

Patterson, who died a few years ago, was an atheist and once told me that he regarded the Bible as “a pack of lies.” There was no way he could be accused of Biblical primitivism. People would ask him, with a note of alarm, “Well, you do believe in evolution, don’t you?” He would respond that science wasn’t supposed to be a system of belief.

So let’s look at the evidence adduced for evolution. The fossil record is sparse. Bats, for example — the only mammals capable of powered flight — appear suddenly in the fossil record, with their sonar systems already fully developed. “There are no half bats,” as a world expert on bats once said. The experts have no idea what animal gave rise to the first bat.

The creatures that evolution purports to explain are fantastically complex. The cell, thought at the time of Darwin to be a “simple little lump of protoplasm,” is as complicated as a high-tech factory. We have no actual evidence that it evolved — and yet we are asked, indeed obliged, to believe that it did.

In the human body, there are 300 trillion cells, and each “knows” what part it must play in the growing organism. To this day, embryologists have no idea how this happens — even though they have been trying to figure it out for 150 years.

Imagine an automobile company that came out with a new model that could do the remarkable things that living creatures do. How amazed we would be! The car would be able to repair itself, if not damaged too badly. Dent it and, in a few days, the dent is gone. It needs to rest for a few hours every day but it can keep going for 80 years on bread and water, with perhaps vegetables thrown in. And it can hook up with another version of the same automobile, and produce in a few months’ time new, tiny versions of itself, which will then grow up to full-size autos with the ability to reproduce in turn.

We have been unable to do anything remotely like this in the lab. Yet we are surrounded by lowly creatures that do these things every day — and we express no amazement. We have been trained to be blasé about the marvels of creation. “Oh, evolution did that,” we say. “It was just a matter of random mutation; nothing surprising there.” “These things arose by accident and were selected for.”

That phrase — “it was selected for” — is regarded as a sufficient explanation for . . . everything. The same mundane phrase is given as the explanation for everything under the sun. How did the bats get sonar? “It arose by an accidental mutation of the genes and was selected for. Next question?” How did the eye develop? “Piecemeal. There was a random mutation and it conferred an advantage so it was selected for. Then the same thing happened over and over again. Next question?” How did the camel get its hump? “Random mutations conferred some advantage and so they were selected for. Next question?”

This is the science before which all knees must bend? These explanations are no better than “Just-So stories” (as one or two Harvard professors have rightly said). No actual digging in the dirt is needed: The theorist merely contemplates the trait in question and makes up a plausible story as to how it might have been advantageous.

We fear questioning the evolutionist dogma. Someone might call us fanatical. “Intemperate” was the word George Will used. So we go along with the dogmas of materialism, lest we be considered ignorant or uneducated or driven by a religious agenda.

Charles Krauthammer tells us that Isaac Newton was religious and if he saw no conflict between science and religion, why can’t we take our thin gruel of evolutionary science like good children and be satisfied, without dragging a Designer into the picture?

Because it isn’t real science, Charles. Newton, in fact, thought that the “most beautiful system” of sun, planets, and comets could “only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.” But the laws of physics that govern these motions are simplicity itself compared with the immense complexity of the biological machinery that governs the development, proliferation, growth, and aging of millions of reproductive species. These mechanisms have yet to be discovered or described. To believe that the feeble tautology of natural selection — laissez-faire political economy from the 1830s imported into biology — constitutes a sufficient explanation of the marvels of nature is to display a credulity that makes our fundamentalists seem sagacious by comparison.

George Will has made one accurate criticism of the idea he so dislikes: “The problem with intelligent design is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable. Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis.” This is true; but he should have added that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is not falsifiable either. Darwin’s claim to fame was his discovery of a mechanism of evolution; he accepted “survival of the fittest” as a good summary of his natural-selection theory. But which ones are the fittest? The ones that survive. There is no criterion of fitness that is independent of survival. Whatever happens, it is the “fittest” that survive — by definition. This, just like intelligent design, is not a testable hypothesis. As the eminent philosopher of science Karl Popper said, after discussing this problem that natural selection cannot escape: “There is hardly any possibility of testing a theory as feeble as this.” Popper was the first to propose falsification as the line of demarcation between theories that are scientific and those that are not; both intelligent design and natural selection fall by this standard.

The underlying problem, rarely discussed, is that the conclusions of evolutionism are based not on science, but on a philosophy: the philosophy of materialism, or naturalism. Living creatures, including human beings, are here on Earth, and we got here somehow. If atoms and molecules in motion are all that exist, then their random interactions must account for everything that exists, including us. That is the true underpinning of Darwinism. What needs to be examined in detail is not so much the religion behind intelligent design as the philosophy behind evolution.

But that is a sermon for another day.

— Tom Bethell is a contributor to National Review. His first magazine article on evolution appeared in Harper’s in 1976. His new book is The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science.

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Under God or Under Darwin? Intelligent Design could be a bridge between civilizations. (National Review Online, 051202)

When President Bush declared his support for the teaching of intelligent design (ID) theory in public schools along with Darwinian evolution, both he and the theory itself drew a lot of criticism. Among the many lines of attack the critics launch, one theme remains strikingly constant: the notion that ID is a Trojan Horse of Christian fundamentalists whose ultimate aim is to turn the U.S. into an theocracy.

In a furious New Republic cover story, “The Case Against Intelligent Design,” Jerry Coyne joined in this hype and implied that all non-Christians, including Muslims, should be alarmed by this supposedly Christian theory of beginnings that “might offend those of other faiths.” Little does he realize that if there is any view on the origin of life that might seriously offend other faiths — including mine, Islam — it is the materialist dogma: the assumptions that God, by definition, is a superstition, and that rationality is inherently atheistic.

That offense is no minor issue. In fact, in the last two centuries, it has been the major source of the Muslim contempt for the West. And it deserves careful consideration.

An Old Wall

The conflict between Christian Europe and the Islamic Middle East has a long history, marked by many crusades and jihads, all of which had both sacred and mundane motives. Yet in the last two centuries, a new kind of West, a modern one, arose, and the relationship between the two civilizations became asymmetrical. Western Europe became overwhelmingly superior to the world of Islam and its sole superpower, the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans’ realization of the West’s ascendancy led them, in the late 18th century, to initiate a process of Westernization. The process, which began by importing Western technology, broadened throughout the 19th century with the adaptation of Western educational systems and legal structures, including a system of constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament. Other than marginal fanatics such as the Wahhabis of the Arabian Peninsula — who launched a revolt against Ottoman rule, asserting that “the Turks became infidels” by abolishing slavery — the Ottoman ulema (religious scholars) and Islamic intellectuals welcomed these reforms.

But it was more than just telegraphs, trains, and constitutions that started arriving from the West; philosophies came as well. And since late-19th-century European thought was predominantly atheistic and anti-religious, these philosophies alarmed Muslim thinkers. When the theories of Comte, Spencer, and Darwin became fashionable among the Westernized Ottoman elite, an intellectual war began. Istanbul, the Empire’s capital, became the stage of hot intellectual debates. While Francophile atheists such as Abdullah Cevdet and Suphi Ethem were quoting the works of Darwin and Ernst Haeckel to argue that man is an accidental animal and religion a comforting myth, Muslim scholars were writing tracts to defend the Islamic faith and refute the “theories of disbelief” pouring in from Europe.

Sadly, it was secularist Europe — and especially, theophobic France — rather than the religious United States that the Islamic world encountered as “the West.” No wonder, then, that the West eventually became synonymous with godlessness. Moreover, within Muslim societies, Europeanized elites grew in number and were seen — with a lot of justification — as soulless, skirt-and-money-chasing men drinking whiskey while looking down upon traditional believers as ignoramuses.

The Muslim reaction to this kind of Westernization was to erect a wall of separation between the West and their communities. “We will get the technology of the West,” declared Said Nursi, a leading Muslim scholar of late Ottoman and early Turkish life, “but never their culture.” That culture, according to Nursi, had a major problem: It was “plagued by materialism.”

The gap between the West and the Middle East deepened owing to the political faults of the West, such as European colonialism and the American support for Middle East tyrannies, and, more recently, the barbaric terrorism of fanatics who act and kill in the name of Islam. Yet, despite these political conflicts, the perception of the West in the minds of devout Muslims remains the greatest underlying problem. Although they admire its freedom, they detest its materialism.

In a recent Spectator piece, titled “Muslims Are Right about Britain,” Conservative British MP John Hayes pointed to the same problem. “Many moderate Muslims believe that much of Britain is decadent,” says Mr. Hayes, and adds, “They are right.” He explained that because of the prevailing culture, “Modern Britons . . . are condemned to be selfish, lonely creatures in a soulless society where little is worshipped beyond money and sex,” and asked, “Is it any wonder that the family-minded, morally upright moderate Muslims despair?”

The distaste for American culture in the Islamic world is based on similar feelings. The America that people see is one represented by Hollywood and MTV. A recent poll in Turkey revealed that 37% of Turks define Americans as “materialistic” while a mere 8% define them as “religious.” Not surprisingly, 90% say that they know the U.S. mainly through television.

From all this, one can see that the much-debated cultural gap between the West and the Muslim world is actually a two-sided coin: While the latter has some extremely conservative or radical elements that turn life into joyless misery, the former has extremely hedonistic and degenerate elements that turn life into meaningless profligacy. And if we look for a rapprochement between Westerners and Muslims, we again have to see both sides of the coin: While Muslim communities need reformers of culture that will save them from bigotry, the Western societies need redeemers of culture that will save them from materialism. Of course, the manifestations of the former (such as support for terrorism) are far more dangerous and intolerable than those of the latter, but as root causes, both must be acknowledged.

Richard Dawkins & the Material Girl

Yes, but what exactly is materialism? Isn’t it more obviously represented by the extravagance of pop stars than by the sophisticated theories of atheist scientists and scholars? Isn’t the cultural materialism of, say, Madonna, quite different from the philosophical materialism of Richard Dawkins?

Well, it is self-evident that they look dissimilar, but the worldviews they represent are intertwined. Cultural materialism means living as if there were no God or moral absolutes, and all that matters is matter. Philosophical materialism means to argue that there is no God to establish any moral absolutes, and matter is all there is. The former worldview finds its justification in the latter. Actually, in the modern world, philosophical materialists act as the secular priesthood of a lifestyle based on hedonism and moral relativism. The priesthood convinces the masses that we are all accidental occurrences who are not under any Divine judgment; and the masses live, earn, spend, and have relationships according to this supposition. A popular MTV hit summarizes this presumption bluntly: “You and me baby ain’t nuthin’ but mammals; so let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.”

The biological justification for promiscuity — that we are “nuthin’ but mammals” — is no accident: The idea that we are all mere animals is at the heart of cultural materialism. And that idea is, of course, based on Darwinism. That’s why Darwinism, in the words of Daniel Dennett, one of its hard-core proponents, acts as a “universal acid; it eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized worldview.”

That “revolutionized worldview” — in which God is denied, attacked, and ridiculed — is the grand problem we Muslims have with the West. It is true that some fanatics among us hate the West’s liberty and democracy, too. Yet for the sane and pious Muslim majority, those are welcome attributes. This majority’s only problem is the materialism that encompasses the West. And they would welcome those who would save the West — and thus the whole world — from it.

A Discovery Zone

That’s why something called the Wedge Document — although horrifying to America’s secularist intelligentsia — offers a message of hope for Muslims. The Wedge Document is a 1999 memorandum of the Discovery Institute (DI), the Seattle-based think tank that acts as the main proponent of ID. In this document, the Institute explains that its long-term goal is “to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies.” Much of the fuss made about the Document by its opponents is absurd; it does not propose the transformation of the U.S. into a theocracy. But, as official DI documents point out, there is nothing wrong in expecting cultural impact from a scientific theory; Darwinians, after all, revel in the cultural impact of their own doctrines.

By its bold challenge to Darwinian evolution — a concept that claims it is possible to be an “intellectually fulfilled atheist” — ID is indeed a wedge that can split the foundations of scientific materialism. ID presents a new perspective on science, one that is based solely on scientific evidence yet is fully compatible with faith in God. That’s why William Dembski, one of its leading theorists, defines ID as a bridge between science and theology.

As the history of the cultural conflict between the modern West and Islam shows, ID can also be a bridge between these two civilizations. The first bricks of that bridge are now being laid in the Islamic world. In Turkey, the current debate over ID has attracted much attention in the Islamic media. Islamic newspapers are publishing translations of pieces by the leading figures of the ID movement, such as Michael J. Behe and Phillip E. Johnson. The Discovery Institute is praised in their news stories and depicted as the vanguard in the case for God, and President Bush’s support for ID is gaining sympathy. For many decades the cultural debate in Turkey has been between secularists who quote modern Western sources and Muslims who quote traditional Islamic sources. Now, for the first time, Muslims are discovering that they share a common cause with the believers in the West. For the first time, the West appears to be the antidote to, not the source of, the materialist plague.

Is ID True?

Of course, ID — like any other scientific theory — stands or falls not according to its political and diplomatic utility, but according to the evidence. So: Is ID true?

There is a huge and growing body of ID literature produced by some of the world’s finest minds, and I won’t attempt even to summarize the overwhelming evidence it presents for design in nature. Yet I think an examination of the main premise behind the current opposition to ID might be helpful.

To see that premise, we first have to note how ID theorists criticize Darwin. They do this by applying his own criterion for falsification. “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications,” said Darwin, “my theory would break down.” ID theorists, such as biochemist Michael J. Behe, apply this criterion to complex biochemical systems such as the bacterial flagellum or blood clotting and explain that they could not have been “formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications” — because they don’t function at all unless they are complete.

What is the Darwinian response to this? Here’s Jerry Coyne again, in The New Republic: “In view of our progress in understanding biochemical evolution, it is simply irrational to say that because we do not completely understand how biochemical pathways evolved, we should give up trying and invoke the intelligent designer.” Note that Coyne is here denying the falsification criterion that Darwin himself acknowledged. According to Darwin, if you demonstrate “that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications,” the theory will break down. According to Coyne, you will only be pointing to a system about which “we do not completely understand how [it] evolved.”

In other words, Coyne leaves no way that the theory can break down. Whatever problem you find with the theory today will somehow be solved in the future. Actually Coyne, quite generously, does give a criterion to refute Darwinism: Should we “find human fossils co-existing with dinosaurs, or fossils of birds living alongside those of the earliest invertebrates,” that would “sink neo-Darwinism for good.” But ID proponents aren’t questioning the fact that dinosaurs predated humans and invertebrates predated birds; our question, rather, is how they came to be. Coyne sounds like someone who would silence a serious critique of the theory of plate tectonics by saying, “Hey, show me that the Earth is flat and thus sink my theory for good, or shut up forever.”

With his solid faith in Darwinism, Coyne also assures us that the gaps in the fossil record — which should have been filled by the 150-year-long desperate search for the fossilized remains of numerous, successive, slight modifications — “are certainly due to the imperfection of the fossil record.” But why can’t we consider the possibility that the gaps might be real — that forms of complex life might have appeared on Earth in the way they are, as the fossil record suggests? The standard reply to this question is the “god of the gaps” argument: that theists have imagined divine powers behind natural phenomena in the past, and science, in time, unveiled the natural processes behind those phenomena. But if we had seen a cumulative filling of gaps since Darwin, we would have agreed. What we have actually seen is the reverse: Ever since Darwin, and especially in recent decades, the problems with the theory of evolution have been deepening and widening. With the discovery of the unexpected complexity of biology, and the sudden leap forward in the history of life with the Cambrian explosion, the Darwinian theory turns out to be based on an atheism of the gaps, in which lack of knowledge about life led to the wrong assumption that it is simple enough to be explained by a non-design theory.

God & Muslims

There are many other attacks on ID in the media, and they are all useful in that they demonstrate the true intellectual force behind Darwinism: a commitment to materialism. The most common argument against ID, that it invokes God and so cannot be a part of science, is a crystal-clear expression of that commitment. Instead of asking, “What if there really were an intelligent designer active in the origin of life?” the Darwinists take it for granted that such a designer doesn’t exist and limit the definition of science according to that unproven premise. Similarly, the evidence for the existence of a pre-Sumerian civilization would not be “a part of history” if you define history as “the discipline that examines the past of human societies starting from the Sumerians and never, ever, accepting the possibility of something else before.” A saner approach would be to question the definition of the discipline that is challenged by evidence — not to ignore the evidence in order to save the definition of the discipline. The reason this saner approach is not the mainstream view in biology is the same old dogmatic belief: materialism.

Of course, Darwinians have the right to believe in whatever they wish, but it is crucial to unveil that theirs is a subjective faith, not an objective truth, as they have been claiming for more than a century. This unveiling would mark a turning point in the history of Western civilization, by reconciling science and religion and letting people become intellectually fulfilled theists. Moreover, it would mark a turning point in the history of the world, by changing the meaning of “the West” and “Westernization” in the eyes of Muslims. They have been resisting the influx of godlessness from the West for a long time; they would be much less alarmed in the face of a redeemed West.

Phillip E. Johnson once said that the ID debate is about the question whether the U.S. is a nation under God or a nation under Darwin. We Muslims see the latter as a plague; we have no problem with the former. We might have disagreements, but we agree on the most fundamental truth of all — that there really is a God out there, and He is the One to Whom we owe our very life and existence.

— Mustafa Akyol is a Muslim writer based in Istanbul, Turkey, and one of the expert witnesses who testified to the Kansas State Education Board during the hearings on evolution. His website is www.thewhitepath.com.

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Religious intolerance in Kansas (townhall.com, 051208)

by Mike S. Adams

Dear Professor Mirecki (PMirecki@ku.edu):

My name is Mike Adams. I am a columnist for www.TownHall.com. Just a few minutes ago, I called your office seeking an interview about your alleged roadside beating at the hands of two apparent Christian fundamentalists. First, let me say that as a fundamentalist Christian I am opposed to any such violence. I am writing, in part, to help you find the men responsible for this beating.

Q: Will you consent to a brief interview?

A: No comment.

Q: Professor, I understand that some people are accusing you of falsifying a report to the police. They say that you were never, in fact, accosted and beaten by a couple of Christians. I want you to know that I will listen to your side of the story. Will you please consent to a brief interview?

A: No comment.

Q: The local Lawrence, Kansas newspaper quotes you as saying, “The right wing wants blood, period. They’re not going to stop until they see blood. They’re not into anything else.” Is this quotation accurate? If so, do you really believe that all members of the “right wing” are violent? As a criminologist, I am interested in your assertions.

I also wonder whether there have been any instances of left-wing speakers being assaulted on your campus by right-wing members of the audience. Please report any examples including, but not limited to, pie throwing.

A: No comment.

Q: Professor, the aforementioned local paper also quotes you as saying, “Whatever I do, whatever I say, they don’t believe anything because that’s the way they are... I know what happened. I got the hell beat out of me. They can say what they want.”

Are you asserting that all members of the “right wing” want to a) attack you physically and b) attack your character?

Is this why you refuse to answer any questions? Do you think that there is a conspiracy to misrepresent your words?

A: No comment.

Q: Can I ask you some simpler questions, professor? For example, how long have you been chairman of Kansas University’s Religious Studies Department?

A: No comment.

Q: Recently, you wrote an e-mail discussing a course you developed in response to “religious fundamentalists” and their efforts to promote intelligent design theory in Kansas’ public schools. In the email, you stated the following: “The fundies (fundamentalists) want it all taught in a science class, but this will be a nice slap in their big fat face by teaching it as a religious studies class under the category ‘mythology.’”

Did the two men who allegedly beat you by the side of the road have “big, fat faces”? Did they assault you with any weapons including, but not limited to, food products?

A: No comment.

Q: The comments you made in the aforementioned email were made on a public list-serve, weren’t they? You have stated publicly that a “mole” recently monitored the atheist and agnostic student organization’s list-serve in order to forward your message to a fundamentalist organization. You stated that “It’s their version of ethics - one citizen spying on another and reporting to authorities.”

Do you believe someone can be spied on in public? Do you consider this “fundamentalist organization” to be one of the “authorities” monitoring you?

A: No comment.

Q: I am told that your beating at the hands of two unidentified men began after they had been tailgating you in a large pickup truck. During the attack, what did they say to you that made you believe the attack was by Christian fundamentalists retaliating against you for your recent email comments about “fundies”?

A: No comment.

Q: After the pickup truck began tailgating you, why did you decide to stop your vehicle?

A: No comment.

Q: When these two men pulled up behind you by the side of the road, why didn’t you just drive off?

A: No comment.

Q: And when the two men got out of the truck, why did you unlock your car and get out?

A: No comment.

Q: You told a reporter earlier this week that you were also struck with a metal object? What did the object look like? How did you know it was metal as opposed to wood, for example? Did you see it?

A: No comment.

Q: After the police arrived at the hospital around 6:40 A.M., you claimed that one of the white males that allegedly attacked you was wearing a red visor and wool gloves. Is that correct?

A: No comment.

Q: Was it cold in Kansas the morning you were allegedly attacked by the side of the road?

A: No comment.

Q: How could you discern the color of the attacker’s visor given that the sun did not rise in Lawrence, Kansas until 7:27 on the morning of the alleged attacks?

A: No comment.

Q: Why was the attacker wearing a visor, which protects one from the sun – and, certainly, not the cold – given that it was not sunny but cold at the time of the alleged attack?

A: No comment.

Q: What do you say to those who suspect you have fabricated these charges in order to promote bigotry against Christians?

A: No comment.

Thank you for your time, professor.

Update: Just hours after his exhaustive interview with Dr. Adams, Professor Mirecki resigned as Chair of Kansas University’s Religious Studies Department. Nonetheless, Dr. Adams insists that the case is far from over.

To be continued…

Mike Adams is a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and is a regular columnist for Townhall.com.

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The strange tales of Paul Mirecki (townhall.com, 051214)

by Michelle Malkin

Paul Mirecki — the Kansas University religious studies professor who derided Christian fundamentalists as “fundies” — is a strange man with strange tales of alleged persecution. Contrary to his knee-jerk defenders on the Left, it is not bigoted, hateful, or intolerant for me to scrutinize his story.

It’s rational.

The professor first created controversy in November after penning an unhinged e-mail message expressing his desire to deliver a “slap” to the “big fat face” of the “fundies” by teaching an intelligent design course “as a religious studies class under the category ‘mythology.’” The message was sent to the mailing list of the university’s Society of Open-Minded (snort!) Atheists and Agnostics. Mirecki signed his taunting diatribe “Evil Dr. P.” These are the words of an individual more than a few cards short of a full deck.

After his remarks were publicized, KU cancelled the proposed course. Mirecki was forced to apologize. And then, out of the blue, It Happened.

Last week, Mirecki claimed he was beaten by two mysterious white men on a rural highway. He says the unidentified assailants, in a pickup that tailgated him in rural Douglas County, Kansas, targeted him for his views while he was “taking a long, pre-dawn drive in the country to clear his mind,” according to the student newspaper. Mirecki says he pulled over to the side of the road to let the men pass. He then said he got out of his vehicle. The alleged attackers got out of their truck and beat “the hell” out of him, reportedly using a “metal object,” Mirecki said last week before abruptly clamming up about the attack and sequestering himself in his house.

News of the beating aligned perfectly with the mainstream media’s template of Christian fundamentalists as right-wing vigilantes. Mirecki’s liberal supporters on the Internet swallowed the story whole. The Wichita Eagle told those with questions about Mirecki’s account to “give it a rest.” A Kansas City Star columnist called allegations of a manufactured hate crime a “cheap shot.”

Why?

Mirecki can’t remember where the incident took place, according to local law enforcement, and has offered only the vaguest of suspect descriptions. There are conflicting accounts about Mirecki’s physical appearance the day of the attack. While a faculty colleague claimed that “big swollen spots” had “transformed” Mirecki’s face, Jesse Plous and Tiffany Jeffers, two of Mirecki’s students, told the campus newspaper they didn’t notice bruises or scratches when they met for his class six hours after the alleged attack. Lindsay Mayer, another student in the class, “said injuries weren’t extremely noticeable.” Mirecki did not mention the alleged beating in class.

Now, a week after the alleged attack with the alleged assailants still at large, Mirecki is poised to take both his university and the local sheriff’s office to court for their insufficient support and investigation. The fundies! Academia! The cops! They’re all in on it!

After university officials announced that Mirecki had voluntarily resigned as chair of the religion department, the professor came out of his shell to blast the school for forcing him to step down. The university stands by its account. Mirecki has complained that law enforcement officials have seized his car and computer, and doesn’t like the direction of the probe. “If I have to sue, I will,” he told the Lawrence Journal-World.

None of this smells right.

The truth is there are too many cases of hate crime hoaxers on campuses — a phenomenon most left-leaning journalists are loathe to cover — to dismiss the possibility in this case. Last year, Claremont McKenna College professor Kerri Dunn was sentenced to prison after she staged an anti-Semitic hate crime against herself. Earlier this year, a lesbian student at Mt. Tamalpais High School in Marin County, Calif., faked several anti-gay incidents to garner attention and sympathy. Leah Miller, a black student at San Francisco State University, admitted to scratching “NIGG” on a dorm room door and writing herself a note with the same epithet. Jaime Alexander Saide, a Northwestern University student, admitted making up anti-Hispanic threats against himself after the school rallied around him with “Stop the Hate” marches.

Strange, isn’t it, how leftists on campus who sneer at blind faith are so often fooled by it themselves.

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Federal Judge Strikes Down Intelligent Design in Pennsylvania Schools (Foxnews, 051221)

Teaching “intelligent design” to high school biology students violates laws prohibiting the endorsement of religion in public schools, a federal judge ruled Tuesday. The ruling in Pennsylvania is a major defeat for proponents of the controversial alternative theory about the origins of life.

“The evidence at trial demonstrates that ID [intelligent design] is nothing less than the progeny of creationism,” wrote U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III.

He said the Dover Area School District’s mandatory policy of reading a statement on intelligent design before teaching the theory of evolution to ninth-grade biology students violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

“I’m very proud of the plaintiffs for standing up and doing what they did,” said newly elected school board member Lawrence Gurreri of the parents who sued the school. “Now we can get this school back to where it’s supposed to be.”

“I think it’s a very sad day,” said David Napierskie, a former school board member who supports ID.

Adherents of intelligent design are vastly outnumbered within the scientific community, although support for the theory is growing, particularly among evangelical Christians. The theory presupposes an “intelligent creator” and seeks to explain the supposed randomness of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The Dover Area School Board enacted the policy of exposing students to ID in October 2004, and is believed to have been the first in the nation to do so. While the board argued that the intelligent designer needn’t be God — some have said it could be a space alien — Judge Jones said such arguments barely disguised the board’s true motives.

“No serious alternative to God as the designer has been proposed by members of [ID], including defendants’ expert witnesses,” Jones wrote. He later noted, “Not one defense expert was able to explain how the supernatural action suggested by ID could be anything other than an inherently religious proposition.”

Defenders of the policy argued the school board was merely supplementing the teaching of evolution with an alternative theory that might better explain the origins of life.

“Because Darwin’s theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered,” read the Dover policy statement. “The theory is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.”

But, as Jones explained in detail, even ID proponents acknowledge that the “designer” in question is a supernatural force. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly held that public schools may not endorse religion of any kind.

What made ID particularly suspect, Jones wrote, was the origin of the theory itself. ID came about after 1987, when the Supreme Court ruled that public schools may not teach “creation science,” or creationism. Intelligent design, Jones said, was a cynical attempt by religious groups to sneak theology into the public schools.

“Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist court,” Jones wrote.

“Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy.”

He continued: “The breathtaking inanity of the board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.”

School boards across the country had awaited Tuesday’s decision with keen interest. Many may now be reluctant to test the waters themselves by introducing ID into biology classes.

Prior to Tuesday’s ruling, the issue had stoked emotions within the divided Dover community, and eight school board members were turned out in a Nov. 8 election. They were replaced by opponents of the policy, who said they would not appeal the decision.

Bernadette Reinking, the board’s new president, said intelligent design would probably be discussed in an elective social studies class after consultation with an attorney.

Gurreri, also one of the new board members elected in November, told FOXNews.com that all the media attention on the community of 20,000 was embarrassing and that tensions linger among residents. The parent of a Dover graduate and self-described churchgoer, he added that he was “very hopeful” residents would move past the ID battle and that the community’s interest in the school system would remain as high as it’s been in the past year.

Napierskie, the former school board member, said the judge overstepped his boundaries.

“[Jones] should have separated the issues and disagreed with the school board decision, but not rule on ID itself. Intelligent design still needs to be debated and discussed,” Napierskie told FOX News.

Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Mich., which represented the school district and describes its mission as defending the religious freedom of Christians, said: “What this really looks like is an ad hominem attack on scientists who happen to believe in God.”

Even if the school board decides to appeal and the case reaches the Supreme Court, it is unclear whether the justices would decide to hear it, as the precedent on religion in schools has remained relatively fixed for the past half-century.

In the landmark Scopes Trial in 1925, a lower court ruled against a teacher who sought to teach evolution. But in 1968 the Supreme Court struck down an prohibition against teaching evolution in Arkansas. Twenty years later, a court decision effectively banned the teaching of creationism in all public schools.

Religious organizations have since tried several times to test the nationwide ban by arguing that there is no creationism in intelligent design. During the Dover trial, a school board member defended a statement he made in an interview, saying he “misspoke” when he advocated balancing evolution with creationism.

The defense also called several scientists as witnesses, rather than theologians. In a brief filed with the court, attorneys insisted that ID is a science, and “is not based on any religious authority or tenet of religious faith, nor does it seek to demonstrate the veracity of any religious authority or tenet of religious faith.”

Other school boards across the country have also sought to diminish the prominence of evolutionary theory in their biology classrooms.

Earlier this month, a federal appeals court in Georgia heard arguments over evolution disclaimer stickers placed in a biology textbooks. A federal judge in January had ordered Cobb County school officials to immediately remove the stickers, which called evolution a theory, not a fact.

In November, state education officials in Kansas adopted new classroom science standards that call the theory of evolution into question.

Kansas Board of Education Chairman Steve Abrams, who supported that state’s new standards, said the circumstances in Kansas and Pennsylvania are much different, given that the Dover board mandated intelligent design in its curriculum.

“We’re not doing that,” he said. “It’s about teaching good critical thinking skills.”

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Intelligent Design and the Courts (townhall.com, 051221)

by Chuck Colson

Yesterday a federal judge in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, issued his long-awaited ruling in the intelligent design (ID) case. As I feared, he ruled against the Dover school system’s inclusion of intelligent design in biology classes. While I am disappointed at the ruling, I am not disheartened, and you should not be either.

In his 139-page opinion, Judge John E. Jones concluded that “it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.” In reaching this decision, he found that intelligent design is not “science” because its ideas can’t be either verified or falsified through normal scientific methods.

Jones also ruled that intelligent design “cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.” He called the claimed secular purpose for including ID in the curriculum—improving science education—”a pretext for the Board’s real purpose”: to promote religion in the public school classroom. (The secular purpose test is decisive in these kinds of cases.) Now, I strongly disagree, but this tells us what has to be done in other cases if we are going to succeed.

Jones was particularly hard on school board members who, in his opinion, lied “time and again . . . to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.” His conclusions about the “real purpose behind the ID policy” were based on what happened outside school board meetings and not just inside them. He pointed to the history of the policy’s adoption and statements made by the policy’s supporters.

By way of anticipating the reaction to the ruling, Jones emphasized that “he wasn’t saying the intelligent design concept shouldn’t be studied and discussed . . . “ And this is the key: In Kansas and other jurisdictions, the teaching is permitted, not mandated. Always seek an open forum, so all sides can be discussed, and science compared to science.

As a lawyer, this case reminds me of the old adage that bad cases make bad law. In this case, I fear, well-intentioned school-board members overplayed their hand: Given the current state of Establishment Clause jurisprudence, there was little chance of the policy, as written, withstanding a constitutional challenge.

The Discovery Institute understands this: In its statement on this case, Discovery opposes “efforts to get the government to require the teaching of intelligent design.” It sees the divisiveness engendered by such policies as likely hindering “a fair and open discussion of the merits of intelligent design among scholars and within the scientific community . . . “ What’s more, Discovery doubts that most teachers know enough about ID to “teach about it accurately and objectively.”

“How can I be an optimist,” you ask, “in the face of yesterday’s decision?” Because I know that if we equip ourselves and do our job, truth will out. We should not despair. Our case is compelling if we frame it carefully, ask the right questions, and expose the claims of Darwinists.

To do this, it means you and I need to equip ourselves. My suggestion to you is that you call us here at BreakPoint (1-877-322-5527) so we can tell you how to get your hands on material that will equip you well to make a case—a case that is strong and will withstand constitutional challenge.

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The Education Monopoly and Intelligent Design (Christian Post, 060104)

With the recent election results in Kansas and Delaware, the debate continues to intensify over teaching evolution and “Intelligent Design” in the public schools. There is much at stake, from scientific integrity to philosophical baggage. The stakes are greater than they ought to be because of the way our country delivers educational services.

Evolution refers to two different but related areas in science. On one hand, evolution is an observable mechanism by which life evolves in modest increments over time. This evolution is an indisputable scientific theory, supported on empirical grounds. On the other hand, evolution is also used to refer to a largely unobservable process by which today’s observable range of life supposedly developed from the earliest days on the earth. In this case, evolution is a hypothesis, proposing that the development of life is an unguided process.

“Intelligent Design” fully accepts evolution in the former sense. But it proposes an alternative hypothesis for the development of life: The development of life was a guided process, caused by an intelligent designer of some sort. This, too, is intuitively compelling. When one sees something complicated and meaningful (for example, Mount Rushmore), it is easy to infer that it was designed. As today’s most famous evolutionist, Richard Dawkins, has said: What we see today has “the appearance of being designed.” Is the apparent design real or an illusion?

Scientific considerations aside, this issue provokes such controversy because the dominant provider of education has such strong monopoly power, and most consumers have little ability to avoid its dictates. Let’s see why this is the overarching problem, and how we could avoid it.

Imagine that the government decides that food is important, so everyone can eat for free at the government-run restaurant in their neighborhood. A government bureaucracy, the manager of the restaurant and a local “Food Board” would determine the menu. And passionate constituents would try to influence their choices. Proponents of the Atkins diet would clamor for all meat, vegetarians would argue for all veggies and other people would want a range of options. This is a recipe for turmoil. For example, if the Atkins people were politically persuasive, the vegetarians would be deeply offended, and the others would not be wholly pleased, either.

The solution is as easy as the problem is silly. The government would allow different types of restaurants to compete, based on consumer preferences. Better yet, government would get out of the restaurant business, leaving that to the private sector, intervening only to help the needy afford food through vouchers or other subsidies to individuals.

The same is true with education. Leaving aside the question of moral obligations, if one group wants their children taught sex education with cucumbers and condoms in the fifth grade, that is their prerogative as parents. But that shouldn’t be forced on other people. Another contentious example is school prayer. Some parents want a prayer to Jesus Christ. Many parents want a prayer to the lukewarm deity of civil religion. Others want no prayer at all or prayer to other gods. By providing options, school choice deals with such issues in a far more effective manner than a government entity with significant monopoly power.

Who doesn’t want this freedom for others? Elitists and theocrats don’t. They wage battle within the monopoly, hoping to capture the process and force their view of truth down the throats of others. (Ironically, these two groups despise each other, but they’re more alike than they realize.) More important, the special-interest group that enjoys its monopoly power is not interested in such freedom. All producers prefer as little competition as possible; the market for education is no different.

For self-proclaimed liberals, this should be an easy decision, given their usual penchant for individual choice and support for the poor. Instead, they are often captive to the dominant interest group. Conservatives generally support competition and the private sector, but they are not passionate enough in this context to carry the day. Libertarians strongly favor breaking up government monopolies, but they are not yet numerous enough to make a difference.

Science, religion and politics. Real wars and now “culture wars” have been fought in their name. Let’s put down our weapons and give all Americans freedom to educate their children as they see fit.

[Editor’s Note: This article also appeared in The News-Sentinel in Ft. Wayne, Ind., on Monday, December 19, 2005.]

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D. Eric Schansberg is professor of economics at Indiana University Southeast and an adjunct scholar at the Acton Institute.

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Intelligent Design — A Scientific, Academic and Philosophical Controversy (Free Congress Foundation, 051206)

Many Americans are focused on what should be taught in the schools regarding our universe and the Earth - how life as we know it has come to be. This has become a hot-button issue, igniting controversy in Kansas over what should be taught in the public schools and in Pennsylvania, where a high profile trial is taking place over a local school board decision. NEWSWEEK featured Charles Darwin on its cover and the current SMITHSONIAN prints a story on Charles Darwin. The controversy is unlikely to fade soon, in large measure because a new school of thought is gaining increasing acceptance within scientific and academic circles.

Intelligent Design holds that nature shows more “design” than many academics in the sciences, education and philosophy are willing to acknowledge. Neo-Darwinists view changes in life forms as happenstance, dictated as much by changes in environment as serendipity. A PBS television series, Evolution, asserted that “all known scientific evidence supports [Darwinian] evolution” and that the scientific community was four-square in support of his theories. No doubt many scientists hold firm to their belief in Darwin but it cannot be asserted credibly that there is only one school of thought - evolution - accepted by the scientific profession.

Many scientists are breaking from Darwinian orthodoxy. The Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank, issued “A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism” several years ago featuring this statement: “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.” Four hundred scientists now have expressed support for this statement, including Dr. Stanley Salthe, Visiting Scientist in Biological Sciences at Binghamton University and Associate Researcher for the Center for the Philosophy of Nature and Science Studies of the University of Copenhagen. Dr. Salthe had specialized in Darwinian evolutionary theory and now criticizes its reductionism, which essentially claims that all changes derive from the effects of competition.

Salthe does not appear to be a conventional conservative thinker. He states: “My opposition to [Darwinan evolutionary theory] is fundamentally to its sole reliance on competition as an explanatory principle (in a background of chance). Aside from being a bit thin in the face of complex systems, it has the disadvantage, in the mythological context of explaining where we come from, of reducing all evolution to the effects of competition.” Salthe considers this to be a “myth” that is morally destructive but “congenial to capitalism.”

Salthe is not the only scientist who takes exception to the no-questions-asked treatment of Darwinism. So does quantum chemist Henry Schaefer at the University of Georgia, a Nobel Prize nominee and recipient of prestigious scientific awards. Dr. Schaefer is a fellow at the Discovery Institute. Biochemist Michael Behe of Lehigh University, microbiologist Scott Minnich of the University of Idaho and mathematician William Dembski of Baylor University are other prominent supporters of Intelligent Design theory.

Dr. John G. West, Associate Director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, commented this summer that “The fact is that a significant number of scientists are extremely skeptical that Darwinian evolution can explain the origins of life. We expect that as scientists engage in the wider debate over materialist evolutionary theories, this list will continue to grow, and grow at an even more rapid pace than we’ve seen this past year.”

The doubters of Darwinism are not confined to the scientific community.

Dr. Antony Flew, a famous philosopher who adhered to atheism, in his later years has come to accept the likelihood of Intelligent Design. He counts himself as a supporter of Darwinism in general but he sees something more compelling behind the creation of the universe. Flew, now more of a Deist, does not acknowledge God as having created the universe, but sees intelligence behind its formation. He is quoted in the Winter 2005 issue of Philosophia Christi (a publication of Biola University, in California): “It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.”

What is Intelligent Design?

Intelligent Design holds that the universe and its living things are not simply the product of random chance; an intelligent cause is behind their existence. Intelligent Design does not conflict with Darwinism’s belief in evolution - that living organisms will change over time. It does run counter to the new school of Darwinism that holds random selection drives evolution. Chance mutations occur without reason. Intelligent Design challenges this direction head-on based upon its belief that changes occur due to a reason.

One useful definition of Intelligent Design can be found in the book, Darwinism, Design, and Public Education, edited by Stephen C. Meyer and John Angus Campbell. The definition presented in this book holds that Intelligent Design is “the theory that certain features of the physical universe and/or biological systems can be best explained by

reference to an intelligent cause (that is, the conscious action of an intelligent agent), rather than an undirected natural process or a material mechanism.”

It is too easy for undiscerning critics to lump Intelligent Design in with creationism. Analysts such as Charles Krauthammer, undoubtedly brilliant, have made that mistake. Krauthammer asserted that Intelligent Design is “today’s tarted up version of creationism.” There is a significant difference. Creationists view the Bible’s word to be the equivalent of scientific text. Believers in Intelligent Design come to their conclusion by the evidence they find in nature. They understand the complexity of the cell; they see the vastness of the universe. Belief in Intelligent Design stems from reason, not revelation. Christians can hold true to belief in God and Intelligent Design. The King James Bible in Romans 1:20 says: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.” Intelligent Design can be accepted by an Antony Flew, who is not a believer in the Christian God.

Creationism has not been taught in most, possibly all, the public schools since the 1987 Supreme Court ruling in Edwards v Aguillard. The decision held that creationism was not science and therefore had no place in the curriculums of public schools. Intelligent Design is quite different in that it is gaining increasing acceptance by scientists who view Darwinism as an insufficient explanation for how our universe was created and how life on Earth started and has developed.

The Discovery Institute takes an interesting position on what should be taught in the public schools. It advised the Dover School Board, now the focus of the court case in Pennsylvania, not to push the teaching of Intelligent Design. Discovery Institute maintains that it is more important that Intelligent Design gain acceptance within the scientific community and academia first. The Institute argues that schools need to present a full picture of Darwinism, treating it as theory - one with noted flaws — rather than established fact. That is starting to occur and if it continues Intelligent Design should earn respectful treatment in school curricula.

It is not mixing apples and oranges to note the vituperation of the Darwinists who cannot stand having a competing theory discussed. One professor at the University of Kansas called Intelligent Design “mythology.” The overheated reactions remind me of the slings and arrows faced by conservatives as we fought to have our ideas, the importance of traditional social values and a strong defense that included a space-based missile defense system, gain ascendancy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We prevailed in many cases based upon our persistence and the soundness of our ideas. Intelligent Design can stand on its merits despite the attempt by Darwin’s true believers to label it as sheer creationism. Many scientists who study the universe or cellular biology are increasingly intrigued by their complex processes. It takes more than chance to create such complex systems. Remember it was Einstein who said, “God does not play dice with the universe.”

Paul M. Weyrich is Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.

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Why Darwinism Survives (Mohler, 060117)

“What is it about even the slightest dissent from Darwin’s theory of natural selection that drives liberal elites (and even some conservative elites) bonkers?” Adam Wolfson asks that question in “Survival of the Evolution Debate: Why Darwin Is Still a Lightning Rod,” an essay published in the January 16, 2006 edition of The Weekly Standard.

Wolfson now serves as consulting editor of Commentary magazine and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. He formally served as editor of The Public Interest, which was for many years one of America’s premier intellectual journals.

In this essay, Wolfson wonders aloud why Darwin, together with his theory of evolution, still serves as such a lightning rod for controversy in American culture. In one sense, Wolfson seizes the opportunity to suggest that controversies over Darwinism are often, if not usually, easily traced to the fact that intellectual elites will accept no criticism of Darwinism whatsoever.

Looking back to the 1920s and the infamous (and usually misunderstood) Scopes trial, Wolfson acknowledges that the elites were offended “that anyone could believe the story of Genesis in a literal way.” Five decades later, the scientific establishment and the elites were driven to apoplexy by the emergence of “creation science,” often reaching the front pages of the nation’s leading newspapers. The intellectual elites cannot abide such naysayers in their presence, so they attempt, as Wolfson helpfully explains, to marginalize, ridicule, dismiss, and send into exile anyone who refuses to swallow Darwinism hook, line, and sinker.

As Wolfson cleverly adapts H. L. Mencken, “Liberals are haunted by the specter that someone, somewhere harbors doubts about Darwin’s theory.” Criticism of evolutionary theory is most commonly found among those who reject the overarching evolutionary worldview. Most often—and most naturally—this group would include conservative, Bible-believing Christians who understand the unavoidable collision between evolutionary theory and biblical authority. Beyond this, the huge worldview implications of the debate transform every point of the controversy into a debate of major significance.

In reality, the issue of evolution not only divides, generally speaking, liberals from conservatives in our current age of ideological conflict. Beyond this, the question of Darwinism divides even some conservatives, revealing a split between conservative Christians and those whose conservatism is more directly linked to social, economic, or political concerns. The Weekly Standard has emerged as one of the flagship institutions of modern conservatism. Accordingly, Wolfson’s essay is written in a rather detached mode, as Wolfson’s main point appears to be that the elites are overreacting to the challenge of Intelligent Design, and thereby revealing their own intellectual insecurity and the inherent weaknesses in the theory of evolution.

Indeed, Wolfson asserts that, “in truth, most people nowadays do believe evolution’s basics—which is to say that species evolved—and most people believe that natural selection explains part of the change of adaptation.” The debate, he asserts, “is over whether natural selection explains everything.”

The “all or nothing” character of Darwin’s theory is often glossed over (if not explicitly denied) by many proponents of evolution. Yet, as Wolfson acknowledges, Charles Darwin understood this dimension of his thought all too well. “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down,” Darwin wrote in On the Origin of Species.

In effect, Darwin invited a challenge to his own understanding of evolutionary theory. In recent years, that challenge has been taken up by the proponents of Intelligent Design, whose central argument is that the complexity of the cosmos cannot possibly be explained by the blind and purely accidental process Darwin described. The concept of “irreducible complexity” counters Darwin’s faith in natural selection with an assertion that such complexity would be mathematically impossible without the presence of intelligence and design guiding the process.

As Wolfson explains, the proponents of Intelligent Design rely on recent developments in physics and biochemistry and “argue that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection cannot explain the existence of some complex biological systems.” Just in case any reader missed his point, Wolfson simplifies the argument with this simple summary: “That is to say, the emergence of these systems is neither mathematically nor biochemically plausible without some intelligent designer in the background.”

Still, Wolfson doesn’t appear to buy the theory. He suggests that the proponents of Intelligent Design “are putting old wine into a new bottle.” Wolfson cites Thomas Aquinas and William Paley as advocates of a theory-from-design deeply rooted in the Christian tradition. “The basic point is that one can make a legitimate, rational inference from the orderliness and regularity of the cosmos to some sort of intelligent first mover. And it’s important to point out that this inference was thought, up until recent times, to stand on its own merits, requiring no assistance from Divine Revelation.”

In essence, Wolfson sees the debate over Intelligent Design as an example of philosophical, rather than scientific, conflict. He also recognizes that the most well-known advocates of Intelligent Design argue that the theory should be taught as part of the science curriculum in the public schools. Wolfson clearly believes that the Intelligent Design theorists are on to something, and he acknowledges his own concerns about the viability of Darwinism as a worldview, but he accepts the argument of the dominant scientific community that Intelligent Design is simply not science.

He cites Princeton professor Robert P. George as another conservative intellectual who believes that Intelligent Design is more properly considered as philosophy rather than science. Like Wolfson, George believes that the theory of Intelligent Design has been useful in countering the hyperbolic arguments offered by evolutionary radicals such as Richard Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould, along with Daniel Dennett. Accordingly, Dawkins, who once claimed that “if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane,” is dismissed as one who misuses Darwinism “as a battering-ram against religion.”

Yet, Wolfson argues that Intelligent Design simply has no adequate scientific model that would replace natural selection in a scientific context, and he cites George as a supporting authority on the question. He also cites Stephen Barr, a theoretical physicist at the Bartol Research Institute of the University of Delaware, as arguing that “some IDers have strayed beyond the confines of science rightly understood.” To these authorities Wolfson adds Leon Kass, the former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics. As Wolfson argues, “Kass credits IDers for drawing attention to various difficulties in orthodox Darwinian theory, as well as for understanding the human stakes involved in such questions.” But Kass argues that the idea of a “Designer-God” is not warranted by the evidence. “There is simply no evidence in support of this proposition,” he claims.

As should be evident by now, Wolfson has attempted to write an essay that praises Intelligent Design as a means of humbling Darwinism but rejects claims that Intelligent Design can be a replacement for Darwin’s theory of natural selection. He fears that Darwinism has become something of an untouchable subject among the elites. Furthermore: “What’s unfortunate is that the ideology of Darwinism—that is, the mistaken notion that Darwin defeated God—not only reigns culturally supreme, but also apparently increasingly has the legal backing of the state.”

Beyond this, Wolfson laments the establishment of “orthodox Darwinism” as the dogma taught in the public schools. “This marks not so much enlightenment’s progress as a narrowing of our intellectual horizons,” he suggests.

Missing from Wolfson’s argument is any intellectual suggestion about how Darwin’s theory is properly scientific while Intelligent Design is presumably not. Beyond this, even as Wolfson rightly criticizes the elites for their ideological insecurity in anxiously dismissing all challenges to evolution, he never explicitly points to a factor that would have strengthened his argument—the fact that Darwinism is as much about a theory of life’s meaning as about its origin. In other words, if Intelligent Design is criticized as philosophy without science, Darwinism is excused as science without philosophy. This is hardly the case.

Nevertheless, Adam Wolfson has demonstrated his intention to write a balanced and fair introduction to the controversy over Intelligent Design and evolution. For that, he deserves our appreciation. Furthermore, the fact that an essay of this character is found in the pages of The Weekly Standard indicates that many conservatives, who would not be counted as conservative Christians, are open to a credible critique of Darwinism. In our present intellectual climate, that factor alone may serve to distinguish conservatism from liberalism and to reveal which system of thought is truly open-minded.

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Is God an Accident of Evolution? The Next Step in Evolutionary Theory (Mohler, 060118)

For the last two centuries or so, the intellectual elites have been predicting the triumph of secularization over belief in God. Thinkers ranging from Auguste Comte to Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx predicted that belief in God would evaporate as human beings gained control over the forces of nature—harnessing the power of steam in great engines, building dams across rivers to produce power, and gaining mastery over disease and physical impairments. Similarly, the prophets of the postmodern age have promised the demise of theism, arguing that belief in a personal and transcendent deity cannot survive the acids of contemporary conceptions of reality.

Strangely enough, those prophecies have not proved to be accurate. To the contrary, a belief in God still characterizes the vast majority of human beings who, as the prophet Isaiah understood, will invent a god of their own imagination even if they do not know the one true God. Paul Bloom understands this. A professor of psychology at Yale University and author of Descartes’ Baby, Bloom argues that human beings are wired for a belief in God. Not that he believes in God himself, mind you. Bloom is a determined rationalist and self-declared atheist. Nevertheless, he finds the persistence of belief in God to be a conclusive proof for Darwin’s theory of evolution. Bloom’s argument is worth a closer look.

In “Is God an Accident?,” an essay published in the December 2005 edition of The Atlantic Monthly, Bloom sets his case clearly. “The United States is a poster child for supernatural belief,” he observes. “Just about everyone in this country—96% in one poll—believes in God. Well over half of Americans believe in miracles, the devil, and angels. Most believe in an afterlife—and not just in the mushy sense that we will live on in the memories of other people, or in our good deeds; when asked for details, most Americans say they believe that after death they will actually reunite with relatives and get to meet God. Woody Allen once said, ‘I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.’ Most Americans have precisely this expectation.”

With that sentence, Bloom acknowledges what many others will not—that it is theism rather than atheism that is the normative belief of most Americans—and most others around the world, for that matter.

The prophets of secularization most often point to the advanced democracies of Western Europe, where very low rates of church participation and religious belief are often observed. Yet, Bloom is convinced that low church attendance does not mean that most of these persons have no belief in God whatsoever. Furthermore, he acknowledges that Western Europe is the anomaly, not the United States and the rest of the world. “After all, the rest of the world—Asia, Africa, the Middle East—is not exactly filled with hard-core atheists,” he explains. “If one is to talk about exceptionalism, it applies to Europe, not the United States.”

Beyond this, Bloom effectively deflates the secularist assumptions of the political elites, pointing out that the vast majority of persons who voted for Senator John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election identified themselves as “religious.” This flies in the face of many in the academy who argue that belief in God, in any concrete and specific sense, is largely limited to the so-called red states and Christian conservatives. Even most scientists believe in God in one sense or another.

“These facts are an embarrassment for those who see supernatural beliefs as a cultural anachronism, soon to be eroded by scientific discoveries and the spread of cosmopolitan values,” Bloom asserts. “They require a new theory of why we are religious—one that draws on research in evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, and developmental psychology.”

Bloom sets out to provide just such an explanation. He considers and then dismisses the functionalist theories offered by sociologists in recent times, focusing instead on an understanding based in evolutionary science. In essence, Bloom argues that belief in God is itself an accident of evolution. What he calls “the religion-as-accident theory” asserts that belief in God is a function of the fact that human beings are wired to believe in a distinction between the physical and the psychological.

“Where does the distinction between the physical and the psychological come from?” Bloom asks. “Is it something we learn through experience, or is it somehow pre-wired into our brains? One way to find out is to study babies. It is notoriously difficult to know what babies are thinking, given that they can’t speak and have little control over their bodies . . . . But recently investigators have used the technique of showing them different events and recording how long they look at them, exploiting the fact that babies, like the rest of us, tend to look longer at something they find unusual or bizarre.”

In essence, Bloom argues that the study of infants indicates that human beings, from the earliest stages of conscious life, possess a thought pattern that distinguishes between physical and psychological realities. Making the distinction between bodies and minds, these babies appear to be pre-wired to believe in something like a soul.

In a fascinating anecdote, Bloom recalls a conversation he had with his six-year-old son, Max. “I was telling him that he had to go to bed, and he said ‘You can make me go to bed, but you can’t make me go to sleep. It’s my brain!’ This piqued my interest, so I began to ask him questions about what the brain does and does not do. His answers showed an interesting split. He insisted that the brain was involved in perception—in seeing, hearing, tasting and smelling—and he was adamant that it was responsible for thinking. But, he said, the brain was not essential for dreaming, for feeling sad, or for loving his brother. ‘That’s what I do,’ Max said, ‘though my brain might help me out.’”

In other words, Max had conceived his personality at distinct from his brain—the psychological as distinct from the physical. From this starting point, Bloom argues that the move to believe in the survival of a soul after death—an afterlife—seems both short and natural.

Similarly, Bloom argues that human beings are also wired to be creationists. Bloom is a champion of evolutionary theory, but he is not willing to call creationists stupid. “Richard Dawkins may well be right when he describes the theory of natural selection as one of our species’ finest accomplishments; it is an intellectually satisfying and empirically supported account of our own existence,” Bloom affirms. “But almost nobody believes it.”

This is what drives so many evolutionary theorists crazy—the persistence of the belief that the cosmos can be explained only by a Creator. Bloom points to evidence indicating that the vast majority of Americans, including those with a college education, believe that God created human beings in their present form and largely reject Darwin’s theory of evolution.

While evolutionists like Richard Dawkins look down upon creationists with scorn, Bloom offers psychological understanding. As he sees it, “The real problem with natural selection is that it makes no intuitive sense.” Bloom compares evolutionary theory to quantum physics, arguing that such ideas “will never feel right to us.” As he explains: “When we see a complex structure, we see it as the product of beliefs and goals and desires. Our social mode of understanding leaves it difficult to make sense of it any other way. Our gut feeling is that a design requires a designer—a fact that is understandably exploited by those who argue against Darwin.” Throughout his essay, Bloom argues that children are actually more religious than their parents—more inclined to belief in God, more likely to assume a Creator, and more trusting in the assurance that the soul exists and will survive death.

All this makes for fascinating reading. Paul Bloom stands out among his fellow evolutionists in terms of his basic understanding of how religious belief functions and why it is so pervasive—even in the postmodern age. He argues that belief in God is an “accidental by-product” of other evolutionary developments. For some reason (and Bloom goes so far as to suggest some of these reasons) human beings possess an ability to detect pattern and to infer a designer. Belief in a supernatural deity seems to be wired into the human species. Bloom resists the intellectual scorn and condescension of evolutionists like Dawkins. Instead, he soothingly assures us that belief in God is simply an accident of evolution—and an accident that has outlived its usefulness.

In the concluding section of his essay, Bloom argues that religion and science are implacable foes. He clearly wants the scientific to triumph over supernatural ideas, but he believes that this will come about when humans discover that their beliefs in the supernatural are simply by-products of the brain’s evolution.

Paul Bloom’s essay—and his intellectual project—represent a challenge to Christian thinking. His observations about infants and the near universality of belief in God serve as useful refutations of many trends in contemporary thought. If nothing else, his cogent observations along these lines will serve to refute the argument of the secularists.

Still, Christians know that Bloom’s explanation is almost precisely wrong. There is a universal awareness of the divine, but this is not an accident of evolution but the gift of the Creator.

As John Calvin explained, “There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of the divinity. This we take to be beyond controversy. To prevent anyone from taking refuge in the pretense of ignorance, God himself has implanted in all men a certain understanding of his divine majesty. Ever renewing its memory, he repeatedly sheds fresh drops.” As Calvin further explained, “from the beginning of the world there has been no region, no city, in short, no household, that could do without religion, there lies in this a tacit confession of a sense of deity inscribed in the hearts of all.”

Nevertheless, Calvin explained that the combination of ignorance and sin explains why some reject the existence of God altogether while multitudes of others worship idols or gods of their own invention.

Given his worldview, Paul Bloom would have us to recognize that we have outgrown the idea of God and that human beings should embrace a secular and scientific worldview, leaving the infantile residue of evolution behind. Christians will look at this same evidence and draw the opposite conclusion—that the persistence of belief in the divine is evidence of the way our Creator has made us and a reminder of the imperative of evangelism—preaching the Gospel to those who are groping in ignorance and confusion. Oddly enough, God leaves evidences of himself in very strange places—even in essays written by atheists.

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Churches Mark ‘Evolution Sunday’ on Darwin’s Birthday Amid Debates (Christian Post, 060213)

Nearly 450 hundred Christian churches across the nation marked ‘Evolution Sunday’ yesterday to commemorate the 197th birthday of Charles Darwin, with pastors and ministers emphasizing their view that one does not have to forsake being a Christian to accept science.

The event began as part of an effort called the Clergy Letter Project, organized by academics and ministers in Wisconsin, including Michael Zimmerman, Dean of the College of letters and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. It involves mostly mainline Protestant Churches.

“It’s to demonstrate, by Christian leaders and members of the clergy, that you don’t have to make that choice,” Zimmerman said, according to the Chicago Tribune.

The debate over evolution is taking place not only in churches but in court rooms and school boards. The struggles have resulted in high profile academic changes in Kansas, where public schools now teach that there are deficiencies in evolution theory. At a recent trial in Pennsylvania, a judge ruled that including a mention of Intelligent Design Theory before the start of a biology class was unconstitutional because the theory was not science, and was a way of promoting Christianity.

Evolution theory holds that all biological organisms, including humans share a common ancestry, developing over millions of years through the processes of natural selection and random mutation. Some conservative Christians oppose the view because literal interpretations of the Bible see the earth as only being several thousand years old.

Zimmerman points out that there are two parts to Evolution Sunday. The first is to demonstrate that “shrill fundamentalist voices” demanding a choice between religion and science are wrong. The second is to demonstrate his view that such Christians are not in the majority, according to the Tribune.

The Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based group which advocates for “Intelligent Design Theory,” rejects materialist views of science, including neo-Darwinian evolution. Intelligent Design holds that some aspects of the universe and living beings are so complex that they cannot be explained by natural selection and random mutation alone, which are two key tenets of evolution theory.

ID proponents say that the complexity of some aspects of the world is due to an intelligent cause or designer. They say the theory does not rely on the Bible but instead focuses an inferring design from observable evidence.

In a statement with the title “On Evolution Sunday It’s Give Me That Old-Time Darwinist Religion,” Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman said, “Evolution Sunday is the height of hypocrisy.”

“Why do Darwinists think it is not okay for people to criticize Darwin on religious grounds, but it is just fine to defend him on religious grounds?” he asks

“Our view is not that pastors should speak out against evolution ‘but that the Darwinists are hypocrites for claiming – falsely – that opposition to Darwinism is merely faith-based, and then turning around and trying to make the case that Darwinism itself is faith-based.”

However supporters of Evolution Sunday say that Darwin’s theories have helped religion to “grow up.”

“He forced religion to grow up, to become really, faith for the first time,” said the Rev. Mitchell Brown to attendants at Evanston Mennonite Church in Evanston, Ill, according to the New York Times.

Evolution Sunday, evolved out of out of The Clergy Letter Project as a response to those who would try to discredit the teaching of evolution theory in public schools. He says that so far, 10,000 ministers have signed on who ascribe to the statement that evolution is “a foundational scientific truth” and that to reject it “is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance,” adding that human minds capable of critical thought are among God’s gifts and should be used.

“…the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator,” the letter reads.

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500 doctoral scientists skeptical of Darwin: Growing list of signatories challenges claims about support for theory (WorldNetDaily, 060221)

More than 500 scientists with doctoral degrees have signed a statement expressing skepticism about Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The statement, which includes endorsement by members of the prestigious U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Russian Academy of Sciences, was first published by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute in 2001 to challenge statements about Darwinian evolution made in promoting PBS’s “Evolution” series.

The PBS promotion claimed “virtually every scientist in the world believes the theory to be true.”

“Darwinists continue to claim that no serious scientists doubt the theory and yet here are 500 scientists who are willing to make public their skepticism about the theory,” said John G. West, associate director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture.

The institute is the leading promoter of the theory of Intelligent Design, which has been at the center of challenges in federal court over the teaching of evolution in public school classes. Advocates say it draws on recent discoveries in physics, biochemistry and related disciplines that indicate some features of the natural world are best explained as the product of an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection.

West said Darwinist “efforts to use the courts, the media and academic tenure committees to suppress dissent and stifle discussion are in fact fueling even more dissent and inspiring more scientists to ask to be added to the list.”

The statement, signed by 514 scientists, reads:

“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.”

West said the Discovery Institute was encouraged to launch a website for the list because of the growing number of scientific dissenters.

“Darwin’s theory of evolution is the great white elephant of contemporary thought,” said David Berlinski, a signatory and mathematician and philosopher of science with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. “It is large, almost completely useless, and the object of superstitious awe.”

Other prominent signatories include U.S. National Academy of Sciences member Philip Skell, American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow Lyle Jensen, evolutionary biologist and textbook author Stanley Salthe; Smithsonian Institution evolutionary biologist and researcher at the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Biotechnology Information Richard von Sternberg, editor of Rivista di Biologia/Biology Forum – the oldest still published biology journal in the world – Giuseppe Sermonti and Russian Academy of Natural Sciences embryologist Lev Beloussov.

The list include 154 biologists, 76 chemists and 63 physicists. They hold doctorates in biological sciences, physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, computer science and related disciplines.

Many are professors or researchers at major universities and research institutions such as MIT, The Smithsonian, Cambridge University, UCLA, University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, Ohio State University, University of Georgia and University of Washington.

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Belief Meets the Universal Acid—Daniel Dennett Strikes Again (Mohler, 060222)

Daniel C. Dennett is at it again. In his new book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Dennett applies his radical vision of Darwinism to belief in God, and the entire question of faith and belief. As you might expect, Dennett doesn’t think much of belief in God.

Dennett is famous for his idea that Darwinism functions as a “universal acid” in contemporary thought—an idea that relativizes all other ideas and reshapes the intellectual culture so that all other ideas must give way or disappear.

Atheism is a central tenet of Dennett’s faith, and he has previously argued that the belief in a personal and self-existent God—any kind of God for that matter—must simply give way to the inexorable progress of evolution. As he sees it, belief in God is a “meme” that functioned for some time as an evolutionary advantage, but has long since outlived its usefulness and now serves as an impediment to the forward progress of the human species.

Accordingly, the concept of God might continue as an intellectual concept that offers a mythological explanation for wonder and beauty, but not in the form of theism or theological realism. In other words, it’s alright to believe in God so long as you do not actually believe that He exists.

In his new book, Dennett calls for what he calls a “common-sense” understanding of religion. For too long, this issue has been avoided out of social politeness, he argues, and now is the time to confront believers with the danger of their belief and the nonsensical nature of their convictions.

The persistence of belief in God does pose something of a difficult question for evolutionists like Daniel Dennett. “According to surveys, most of the people in the world say that religion is very important in their lives. Many would say that without it, their lives would be meaningless,” Dennett concedes. “It’s tempting just to take them at their word, to declare that nothing more is to be said—and to tiptoe away. Who would want to interfere with whatever it is that gives their lives meaning?”

Nevertheless, Dennett argues that to do that is to willfully ignore serious questions. He suggests that some forms of religious belief are more inherently dangerous than others, but wonders whether right-minded (which is to say atheistic) observers should leave believers “to their comforts and illusions” or, in the service of humanity, “blow the whistle?”

Never underestimate Dennett’s capacity for condescension. “Dilemmas like that are all too familiar in somewhat different context, of course. Should the sweet old lady in the nursing home be told that her son has just been sent to prison? Should the awkward 12-year-old boy who wasn’t cut from the baseball team be told about the arm-twisting that persuaded the coach to keep him on the squad? In spite of ferocious differences of opinion about other moral issues, there seems to be something approaching consensus that it is cruel and malicious to interfere with the life-enhancing illusions of others—unless those illusions are themselves the cause of even greater ills.”

The diversity of religious beliefs and the persistence of belief itself provides Dennett with evidence that faith in some form must have served as an evolutionary meme that helped the species to perpetuate itself against the fear of death and tragedy. In other words, the experience of death, he argues, provided the need for some mythological projection of an afterlife in order to assist survivors to continue life and productive work. In an interview with The New York Times, Dennett said: “When a person dies, we can’t just turn that off. We go on thinking about that person as if that person were still alive. Our inability to turn off our people-seer and our people-hearer naturally turns into our hallucinations of ghosts, our sense that they are still with us.”

But make no mistake, Dennett does not allow for a moment that the afterlife, or the soul, can possibly be real. “I don’t believe in the soul as an enduring entity,” Dennett told the Times. “Our brains are made of neurons, and nothing else. Nerve cells are very complicated mechanical systems. You take enough of those, and you put them together, and you get a soul.” Got it?

Dennett’s biological reductionism is almost breathtaking in its inflexibility. Throughout Breaking the Spell, Dennett applies biological reductionism to every conceivable aspect of life—from a parent’s commitment to take care of children to the experience of love. Beyond this, he seems even to suggest that parents should provide their children with an adequate sex education in order to give evolution something of a boost.

One of the most interesting aspects of Dennett’s new book is his suggestion that belief is a less interesting question than “belief in belief.” Accordingly, he attempts to take something of an intellectual step back from the question of belief (at least at some points) and suggests that many persons who appear to be believers actually do not believe in the tenets of their faith, but only in belief itself.

He enters this issue through the prism of the modern cult of tolerance. He suggests that those who call themselves believers in God but advocate tolerance of other belief systems are either disingenuous or confused. That is to say that those who believe in God but are satisfied to see others accept alternative belief systems either do not understand the importance of the question or they do not actually believe in the God they claim as the object of their worship.

Dennett is on to something here, but not what he thinks. He seems to lack any understanding of religious liberty as a social compact and he avoids the idea that persons can be sincere believers and still accept the right of others to disagree. Christians can never be satisfied to know that others reject faith in the one true and living God and resist the gospel of Jesus Christ, but we can accept the fact that we have no power to coerce the soul and we would seek no state coercion, even if available.

A key insight from Dennett’s eccentric theory is the fact that “moderates” in matters of belief are truly in a most awkward situation. “There are moderates who revere the tradition they were raised in, simply because it is their tradition, and who are prepared to campaign, tentatively, for the details of their tradition, simply because, in the marketplace of ideas, somebody should stick up for each tradition until we can sort out the good from the better and settle for the best we can find, all things considered.”

A close look at that statement reveals something of genuine importance—there are persons who believe in the tradition simply because it is traditional—whether or not it is true. To a great extent, this explains the quandary of mainline Protestantism and the inherent weakness of revisionist theologies.

As Dennett looks at the moderates, he sees their faith as something more like “allegiance to a sports team.” Such “belief” can give zest and meaning to life, but is not to be taken seriously as a worldview. He refers to his own allegiance to the Boston Red Sox as “enthusiastic, but cheerfully arbitrary and undeluded.” “The Red Sox aren’t my team because they are, in fact, the Best,” he concedes. Instead, “they are the Best (in my eyes) because they are my team.”

Those who hold to such moderated views of theistic belief are actually affirming belief in belief, rather than the truths themselves. They see religious conviction as something that can provide meaning to life and solace in the midst of sorrow, but not something that is to be understood in terms of a realist conception of truth. In other words, belief in God is helpful and potentially healthy even if untrue.

This is the very formulation Dennett just will not accept. His own self-designated intellectual superiority leads him to look upon moderates with disdain even as he looks upon true believers with pity. Belief in belief is actually no less dangerous than belief itself, if for no other reason than it helps to foster the illusion of widespread faith in God.

As in his previous writings, Dennett straightforwardly suggests that theists should be excluded from all public conversation. Those who base their worldview in theism “should be seen to be making it impossible for the rest of us to take their views seriously,” Dennett argues. Believers are “excusing themselves from the moral conversation, inadvertently acknowledging that their own views are not conscientiously maintained and deserve no further hearing.”

Those who base their worldview on the existence of God and the centrality of that belief are “taking a personally immoral stand,” he asserts.

In an article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dennett suggests that those who believe in God are “disabled for moral persuasion, a sort of robotic slave to a meme that you are unable to evaluate.” So, “your declarations of your deeply held views are posturings that are out of place, part of the problem, not part of the solution, and we others will just have to work around you as best we can.”

His conclusion: “It is time for the reasonable adherents of all faiths to find the courage and stamina to reverse the tradition that honors helpless love of God—in any tradition. Far from being honorable, it is not even excusable. It is shameful. Here is what we should say to people who follow such a tradition: There is only one way to respect the substance of any purportive God-given moral edict. Consider it conscientiously in the full light of reason, using all the evidence at our command. No God pleased by displays of unreasoning love, is worthy of worship.”

All this verbiage amounts to a display of Dennett’s own Darwinist fundamentalism. He is at least as unbending and fideistic in his acceptance of the central tenets of Darwinism as any orthodox believer in God.

This point was eloquently made by Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic in his review of Breaking the Spell in the February 19, 2006 edition of The New York Times. Wieseltier describes Dennett’s book as “a merry anthology of contemporary superstitions.” As Wieseltier explains, Dennett’s book is not even based, “in any strict sense,” on scientific research. Instead, Dennett is telling a story and Breaking the Spell “is a fairy tale told by evolutionary biology.” Wieseltier asserts that Dennett provides “no scientific foundation” for the book’s basic argument. “I am not at all claiming that this is what science has established about religion . . . . We don’t yet know,” Dennett admits.

Wieseltier’s rejoinder is classic: “So all of Dennett’s splashy allegiance to evidence and experiment and ‘generating further testable hypotheses’ not withstanding, what he has written is just an extravagant speculation based upon his hope for what is the case, a pious account of his own atheistic longing.”

Even more important, Wieseltier points to the central flaw in Dennett’s argument. “He thinks that an inquiry into belief is made superfluous by an inquiry into the belief in belief. This is a very revealing state. You cannot disprove a belief unless you disprove its content. If you believe that you can disprove it any other way, by describing its origins or by describing its consequences, then you do not believe in reason. In this profound sense, Dennett does not believe in reason,” Wieseltier concludes.

Our contemporary world is a circus of competing worldviews, and Daniel C. Dennett is, along with Oxford professor Richard Dawkins, one of the most radical theorists in the Darwinian camp. Nevertheless, we owe him his due in acknowledging that he (and Dawkins) are simply more willing to say what other evolutionists surely think, for the strident and condescending atheism of Dennett and Dawkins is actually the logical conclusion of the Darwinian project.

In this sense, Breaking the Spell is a truly revealing book, but it doesn’t reveal much insight concerning belief in God. Instead, it reveals the hardening contours of the Darwinian worldview.

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Rebuking the ‘Clergy Letter Project’ (Christian Post, 060228)

Recently, AgapePress reported that over 10,000 members of the clergy from mainline churches had signed a letter stating they rejected a literal interpretation of the creation story. The “Clergy Letter Project,” the brainchild of University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh administrator Michael Zimmerman, advocates that “the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist.” The purpose of the letter is to urge school board members to reject such teachings as Scientific Creationism and Intelligent Design and “preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge.”

It is most unfortunate so many Christian leaders have concluded that evolution is scientific, whereas creationism and intelligent design are simply religious — when, in fact, evolution is incapable of being scientifically proven.

Evolution operates too slowly to be measured. To actually observe the transmutation of one organism to a higher form would presumably take millions of years. No team of scientists could ever make measurements on such an experiment, and, therefore, the matter is beyond the realm of empirical science. Although there is some evidence of small variations in organisms today, there is no way to conclusively prove the changes within the present kinds can eventually metamorphose or actually change into different and higher kinds.

Leading evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky, in On Methods of Evolutionary Biology and Anthropology, once admitted: “The applicability of the experimental method to the study of such unique historical processes is severely restricted before all else by the time intervals involved, which far exceed the lifetime of any human experimenter. And yet, it is just such impossibility that is demanded by the anti-evolutionists when they ask for ‘proofs’ of evolution which they would magnanimously accept as satisfactory.” L. Harrison Matthews in the forward of a 1971 edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species, once concluded: “Our theory of evolution has become ... one which cannot be refuted by any possible observations. It is thus ‘outside of empirical science,’ but not necessarily false. No one can think of ways to test it.”

There can essentially only be one reason for favoring evolution, and that reason has nothing to do with science. It has to do with something outstanding British biologist D.M.S. Watson said in Nature back in 1929: “[T]he theory of evolution itself, a theory universally accepted not because it can be proved logically coherent evidence to be true but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.”

Indeed, special creation is incredible and it’s diametrically opposed to evolutionary theory. The two cannot possibly be reconciled, no matter how many clergy sign a letter saying they can. Dr. Henry Morris, in his book Scientific Creationism, rightly contends: “The evolutionary system attempts to explain the origin, development, and meaning of all things in terms of natural laws and processes which operate today as they have in the past. No extraneous processes, requiring the special activity of an external agent, or Creator are permitted. The universe, in all its aspects, evolves itself into higher levels of order (particles to people) by means of innate properties.” In other words, evolution is a system of belief that argues that creation is totally naturalistic, material, and purposeless — all of which are fundamentally opposed to the creation account in Genesis. It can’t be both ways — either one is true and the other false.

Moreover, to doubt a literal interpretation of the creation account is to undermine everything taught in the Bible. In Exploring Genesis, John Philips argues that to abandon the creation account as “unfactual and unreliable, as mere mythology, as a doctored-up copy of the Babylonian creation epic, as totally unacceptable to modern science” is to surrender to Satan. Philips adds, “If the Holy Spirit cannot be trusted when He tells of creation, how can He be trusted when He tells of salvation. If what He says about earth in Genesis 1 can be questioned, then what He says about heaven in Revelation 22 can be questioned. If the Holy Spirit cannot be trusted in Genesis 1, how can he be trusted in John 3:16?”

Is it any wonder a recent survey by Barna Research discovered a large majority of pastors believe their congregant’s faith in God is a high priority when in fact it is not. Barna reported that in Protestant churches, “Not quite one out of every four (23%) named their faith in God as their top priority in life.” Obviously, ministers are failing to recognize that their compromises with worldly philosophies in their religious instruction are destroying the ability of their parishioners to thrive in a personal relationship with God. Certainly if clergy compromise with evolutionary dogma and imply by that good thinking is naturalistic thinking, that life is essentially materialistic, and bringing God into the picture can lead to confusion and error, does one honestly think it’s possible for members of the church to see God as a reality one can never afford to ignore?

According to AgapePress, Zimmerman says these 10,000 members of the clergy that have signed the Clergy Letter Project “are saying that intelligent design, creation science, is not only bad science as defined by the world community, but it is also bad religion.” Hah! It’s just the opposite! Evolution neither makes for good science nor religion.

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Rev. Mark H. Creech (calact@aol.com) is the executive director of the Christian Action League of North Carolina, Inc.

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Gallup Report: More than Half of Americans Reject Evolution, Accept Bible (Christian Post, 060313)

A recently released Gallup report revealed that more than half of all Americans that reject the evolution theory and scientific evidence, agree with the statement, “God created man exactly how Bible describes it.”

The report was written by the director of The Gallup Poll, Frank Newport and released last Wednesday. The poll was taken last September and posed the question, “Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings?”

The result – 53% chose “God created man exactly how Bible describes it,” 31% said man did not evolve but “God guided,” and 12% backed evolution with God playing “no part,” according to the journal Editor & Publisher.

“Surveys repeatedly show that a substantial portion of Americans do not believe that the theory of evolution best explains where life came from,” the report concluded. “[They are] not so quick to agree with the preponderance of scientific evidence.”

Furthermore, the poll discovered that 57% of Republicans backed the view that “God created human beings in present form” versus 44% of Democrats.

It also revealed that support for the Bible view of creation rises progressively with age from 43% for age group 18-29 to 50% for those 65 and older. However, support for the Bible view declined with education, from 58% of those with high school degrees to 25% for those with postgraduate degrees.

“Several characteristics correlate with belief in the biblical explanation for the origin of humans. Those with lower levels of education, those who attend church regularly, those who are 65 and older, and those who identify with the Republican Party are more likely to believe that God created humans ‘as is,’ than are those who do not share these characteristics,” said Newport.

The Gallup Poll has asked the same question in different forms since 1982 and there has been consistent support of 45% or higher for the view that “God created man in present form.”

The debate between evolution and an intelligent designer or Biblical creation has played out in schools and court houses across America. Recently in late February, a large gathering of scientist rallied in St. Louis to support evolution from what they called religious pressure in public schools.

Also last month, in a surprising move, over 10,000 members of the clergy from mainline churches signed a letter stating they rejected a literal interpretation of the creation story. The “Clergy Letter Project,” which advocates that “the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist,” is urging school board members to reject such teachings as Scientific Creationism and Intelligent Design and “preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge.”

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Intelligent Design Supporters Say Theory In ‘Infancy’ (Associated Press, 060403)

Louisville, ky. (ap) - to william dembski, all the debate in this country over evolution won’t matter in a decade.

By then, he says, the theory of evolution put forth by charles darwin 150 years ago will be “dead.”

The mathematician turned darwin critic says there is much to be learned about how life evolved on this planet. And he believes the model of evolution accepted by the scientific community won’t be able to supply the answers.

“i see this all disintegrating very quickly,” he said.

Dembski is one of the country’s leading proponents of intelligent design, which asserts that certain features of living organisms are best explained by an intelligent cause. The ideas put forth by dembski’s movement have piqued the interest of some local school boards, churches and politicians - including kentucky’s governor and president bush.

But biologists call dembski’s statements on the death of evolution absurd. They say intelligent design, or id, has failed as a science, so its supporters are trying to foster interest in a receptive public.

Dembski, who holds a ph.d. In both mathematics and philosophy, teaches a course on intelligent design at the southern baptist theological seminary in louisville. He calls darwinian evolution “viscerally unacceptable” to most americans.

“it is a reasonable question to ask if there are patterns in biological systems that point us to intelligence,” he said in an interview. “it is a reasonable question to ask what are the limits to evolutionary mechanisms.”

Kentucky gov. Ernie fletcher called design by an intelligent source a “self-evident truth” in his annual state of the commonwealth address in january. Fletcher has said he would encourage schools to teach the concept.

That is despite a december ruling by a federal judge in pennsylvania that id should not be taught as science in dover, pa., schools.

U.s. District judge john e. Jones wrote that “overwhelming evidence at trial established that id is a religious view, a mere relabeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory.” Jones found intelligent design failed as a scientific theory because it can’t be tested.

“he pretty much pegged it for what it was,” said james krupa, an associate biology professor at the university of kentucky. “it really should just be called god theory.”

Krupa said evolution science is not dying.

“it’s the driving force, it’s the foundation of all biology,” said krupa, who teaches evolution courses at the university. “natural selection and evolution theory are getting stronger and stronger.”

For the american public, opinions on evolution vary.

According to a 2004 gallup poll, about 35% of americans believe darwin’s theory is well supported by evidence, another 35% said it is not and 29% said they didn’t know enough about it.

Several state legislatures are considering bills critical of the traditional teaching of evolution in the classroom. Legislators in oklahoma and missouri have introduced measures to change science teaching standards. In nevada, a masonry contractor has introduced a constitutional amendment that says there are many questions about evolution.

“it’s an ongoing debate; i’m not surprised that the public tends to be somewhat interested in it,” said rob crowther, a spokesman for the seattle-based discovery institute, which funds intelligent design research.

That debate is fueled by a belief that darwinian evolution is linked to atheism, said eugenie scott, director of the national center for science education, and former uk professor.

“this is actually, i think, key to understanding this whole controversy in this country: people think that because science restricts itself to a natural cause, it’s therefore saying that god had nothing to do with it.”

Dembski and other id proponents say intelligent design is in its “infancy” and not yet ready to be taught alongside evolution in the science classroom. Crowther said the discovery institute actually opposed the actions by the pennsylvania school board that brought the federal court case.

“people assume that we must be actively and aggressively seeking for intelligent design to be put in the classroom, and that’s not our position. What should be required in a classroom is more about evolution, and by that we mean students should be able to learn not only the evidence that supports it, but also some of the criticisms of the theory.”

That is enough for now, dembski said.

“i guess i would say that even though intelligent design has a long way to go, it seems to me evolutionary theory is so problematic that just about any alternative that’s scientific, or has the possibility (of being scientific) should be allowed on the table.”

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Seed Magazine Writes About The ‘Clergy Letter Project’ (Christian Post, 060404)

Seed magazine is a part of seed media group, which describes itself as “an emerging science media and entertainment company” that creates and distributes “content that communicates science’s fast changing place in our culture to an international audience.”

In a recent article titled “strange bedfellows,” seed reported on the clergy letter project, which garnered the signatures of over 10,000 clergy who claim the “theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth” that is compatible with christianity. Because i had written a column entitled “rebuking the clergy letter project,” seed requested an interview with me for the story.

The article, i thought, was certainly skewed toward evolution, accepting rather blindly new york times science writer ken chang’s assessment that the discovery institute’s “dissent from darwin” statement (a statement by over 500 doctoral scientists expressing doubts concerning the claims of evolution) was without credibility because most of its signers were evangelical non-biologists. According to john west of the discovery institute, most of the scientists chang interviewed didn’t base their doubts of darwinism on their religion, but their scientific views. And it shouldn’t present a problem some of the scientists were non-biologists when so many of darwinism’s most avid defenders are non-biologists. Moreover, west argues the single largest group of the signers was biologists (154 of the 514). He adds: “of course the list also includes many scientists specializing in chemistry, physics, engineering, mathematics/statistics, and related disciplines. But since darwinists continually assert that their theory has implications for many scientific fields, why shouldn’t scientists from these other fields have the right to speak out?”

One aspect i did, however, appreciate about the article was its objectivity regarding the clergy letter project. It simply states: “while most of the signing clergy interviewed espoused the common theme that their religion is pro-science, many others were mistaken about the science they apparently supported.” Indeed, many on that list are obviously in error — failing to recognize that evolution by definition repudiates the scripture’s teaching of a sovereign god and the full scope of his work in christ to the consummation. As i noted in the seed article: “clergy, like those that have signed the clergy letter project — those that have given away a portion of the truth in order to defend the rest of it — are no real friends of true religion or the bible.” They have, without question, embraced something that is neither good science nor religion.

When maggie witlin, the author of the piece in seed magazine contacted me about an interview, she sent me a series of very probing and insightful questions via e-mail that i sought to answer thoroughly. However, only a smidgen of what i gave witlin was used in her article. I thought many would be interested in knowing what her questions were and how they were answered. I’ve included them below with a prayerful spirit that god might use what was said as a means of defending and furthering the truth.

1. What was your first reaction to the clergy letter project? What do you find most troubling about it?

I must confess my first reaction to the clergy letter project was one of grief, but not one of surprise. We are, unfortunately, living in a day when clergy by the masses are exchanging the inerrant and eternal truth of holy scripture for the newest morality, theology, or latest intellectual sophistry. Ministers are charged with a high and holy calling. Deposited to their care are the oracles of god found in the bible. They are required to preserve and teach them faithfully.

Jesus used bitter and castigating words to denounce the religious leaders of his day that failed in this task. They added and subtracted from the scriptures and substituted them with the empty philosophies, speculations, and traditions of men. These religious leaders required the oracles of god to adapt to their presuppositions rather than necessitating their presuppositions conform to the word of god. Thus, jesus said that they had become “blind guides” and had “shut up the kingdom of heaven.” The clergy letter project is a perfect modern day example of this situation.

What is most troubling about this type of approach to the scriptures — the kind that says the creation account is not trustworthy — that it is mythological and shouldn’t be taken literally — that it should be read as metaphorical or as an allegorical story is that it creates a wake of jumbled moral confusions and provides no certain light — no sure word regarding god, life, and eternity.

2. Very briefly (because i can gather this from your agapepress editorial), what are your scientific concerns with evolution and members of the clergy favoring its teaching?

Evolution is not supported by the majority of scientific laws, such as the laws of first cause, the first and second law of thermodynamics. In short, how can evolution be science if it is not supported by science?

Although many contend evolution is a proven scientific fact, this is simply a false teaching. There are thousands of scientists today who reject evolution. Just recently, worldnetdaily reported “[m]ore than 500 scientists with doctoral degrees have signed a statement expressing skepticism about darwin’s theory of evolution.” The statement includes the signatures of some incredibly prestigious persons in the scientific community from the u.s. National academy of sciences, american association for the advancement of science, the smithsonian, the national institute of health’s national center for biotechnology information, rivista di biologia/biology forum, giuseppe sermonti and russian academy of natural sciences, mit, cambridge university, ucla, university of california at berkeley, princeton university, university of pennsylvania, ohio state university, university of georgia and university of washington. If evolution were a scientifically proven fact, so many reputable scientists wouldn’t be expressing such skepticism.

Neither evolution nor creation is, in fact, a valid scientific theory or hypothesis because neither can really be tested. When this is the case, that is that neither can be confirmed experimentally, then the usual practice is that the system or model that correlates the greatest number of data, with the smallest number of unresolved contradictory data, is favored as the model most plausible to be correct. So both evolution and creation are essentially faith systems with claims of evidence to be considered. However, i am unswervingly convinced the system that has the strongest evidence for the truth is creation science and not evolution. Once all the data is carefully considered, i believe it takes much more faith to accept the claims of evolution than the claims of the bible’s creation account.

When clergy embrace the teachings of evolution as truth and abandon the authority of scripture, they are not using their brains as the clergy letter project claims; instead they are demonstrating they have been brainwashed.

3. Do you believe that science is a way to truth? How much truth can it provide, and what kinds of truth can it provide?

I genuinely believe that all truth is from god, whether truth in science or in the bible. The ten commandments and jesus’ sermon on the mount are surely from god. But so is the musical scale, the multiplication table, the chemical composition of water, the photosynthesis of a plant, and the laws of gravity — all these factual principles are from god. God is the source of truth.

God is also the one who established all scientific laws, and good science will point to him. That’s why we needn’t fear that there will ever be a discovery of some scientific fact that contradicts the bible properly interpreted.

For instance, some christians (i don’t know of any today, but this was the case at one time) have erroneously taught that the earth is flat and that it has four corners, because the bible says god “shall assemble the outcasts of the earth and gather the dispersed of judah from the four corners of the earth” (isaiah 11:12). John jasper, a famous minister of yesteryear from richmond, virginia, used to preach a sermon titled, the sun do move. Jasper’s premise was that the bible teaches that the world is flat and stationary and the sun moves around the earth. But good bible scholars know this is a poor interpretation and a violation of the most fundamental principles of hermeneutics — the science and art of interpretation.

Let’s not forget that the bible also speaks of the earth as a sphere or a globe in isaiah 40:22. Jesus implied that the earth revolves around its axis when he spoke of his second coming in luke 17:34-36. In other words, when christ comes again — in that one brief moment — in some part of the earth it will be night and people will be sleeping and in another part it will be day and they will be working.

Obviously, the “four corners of the earth” is just colorful language used to describe four directions, namely, north, east, south and west. Christ spoke of gathering israel “from the four winds” (matthew 24:31). Such language to describe the natural world is simply that of observation and never meant to be interpreted as doctrine for a flat earth.

No, there is no contradiction in the bible to any fact of science, when the scriptures are properly interpreted.

However, science doesn’t always get it right either. The evolutionist’s interpretation of the geological formations, for example, has caused many to think in terms of slowly accumulated strata. The evolutionist describes the earth as millions of years old — such is the heart of evolutionary theory. (the data accumulated by scientists and their interpretation in favor of an earth developed over millions of years has caused many theologians to abandon their belief in a six day creation and advance such theories as “the gap theory,” “the day-age theory,” “progressive creation,” “theistic evolution,” etc.) But all of what the scientist sees is not what it seems. A scientific examination of geological processes reveals that something cataclysmic occurred that transformed the world into the way it appears today. What we currently see in geological features is primarily the result of the noahic flood as described in the book of genesis and not evolutionary processes. The earth is still relatively young as the bible reveals and not millions of years old as evolutions contend. Thus, i suggest it is the scientists’ interpretation of the data that often misleads.

I would agree the bible is not a textbook on science. But that doesn’t mean that it is either untrue or unscientific when it mentions matters of science incidentally or plainly. In order to find the truth either in science or the bible, the proper interpretation is the key. This is not simply a subjective matter, however. Theologians must use proper hermeneutics. And scientists who properly interpret their data won’t be lead away from god and the teachings of the bible.

Moreover, clergy, like those that have signed the clergy letter project, those that have given away a portion of the truth in order to defend the rest of it, are no real friends of true religion or the bible. If the bible has errors with respect to science, but not theology, what is to prove the theology is correct if the science isn’t? In other words, if the bible isn’t correct when it speaks of creation, how can it be trusted when it speaks of salvation? If the scriptures are not right when it speaks of the earth, how can it be trusted when it speaks of heaven?

4. What is your precise denomination (i’m not familiar with subdivisions of baptism)? Do you believe in a literal interpretation of the bible? Do you believe different christian denominations and sects are all good christians? (if the phrasing of these questions feel off to you, please feel free to answer slightly different versions of the questions)

I am a southern baptist. However, as executive director of the christian action league of north carolina, i represent conservative evangelicals from fifteen different denominations in the tar heel state.

Your questions, “do you believe in a literal interpretation of the bible?” And “how literally should a christian take the bible?” Are, i believe, somewhat misleading. Again, i need to reiterate. The scientific method used for properly interpreting scripture is hermeneutics. Those that use these principles for interpretation discover the bible is a divinely inspired book, but clearly meant to be understood on a human level. Every sentence must be understood within its proper context: its author’s intentions, its intended audience, when it was written, whether it’s poetry, allegory, or a historical narrative. The genesis narrative, however, is plainly a historical narrative, and, therefore, must be read and interpreted as literal history.

No matter what denomination one may come from, there is essentially only one qualification to rightly assume the identification of “christian.” One must receive the lord jesus christ and enter into a personal relationship with him as lord and savior (john 1:16). One must acknowledge their sinfulness and turn to him in faith for forgiveness, believing that christ’s finished work on the cross and bodily resurrection from the dead is sufficient for their redemption from sin and receiving the gift of eternal life, not their good works (i corinthians 15:1-4; i john: 5:13; romans 10:9-10; ephesians 2:8-9). Good works are the natural outworking of a genuine conversion experience and not what secures one’s place in the kingdom of god. According to the bible, all saints are but saved sinners.

This is why millions of what we might call “good christians” believe god used the means of darwinian evolution (not realizing that the purpose of evolution is to completely discount god — to entirely remove him from the picture) to create the earth. But in taking that approach they unwittingly compromise the integrity of the very faith they say they hold so dear. It’s a failure on their part.

In the end, only god can judge to what extent the degree of their guilt — whether they were really “good christians” or not — whether their allegiance to evolution was out of spiritual ignorance or whether it was a willful departure from god’s revealed truth.

5. If evolution were shown to be true, as many scientists say it is under the standard scientific burden of proof, how should a good christian deal with it? (i.e, you discuss how evolution is bad science, but if it were good science, would that matter? Or do you not believe good science can possibly ever contradict christian thought?)

It is impossible and will remain impossible to scientifically prove the theory of evolution, no matter how many scientists say otherwise. Scientists who insist that evolution has been scientifically proven are simply disseminating a false teaching. As i mentioned in my editorial: “evolution operates too slowly to be measured. To actually observe the transmutation of one organism to a higher form would presumably take millions of years. No team of scientists could ever make measurements on such an experiment, and, therefore, the matter is beyond the realm of empirical science. Although there is some evidence of small variations in organisms today, there is no way to conclusively prove the changes within the present kinds can eventually metamorphose or actually change into different and higher kinds.”

What is more, the second law of thermodynamics constitutes an incredible difficulty for evolutionists. Creationists are often baffled at the way evolutionists seem to dismiss it. This law states that there exists a fundamental and universal change in nature that is downhill and not uphill, as evolution claims. In order for an organism to advance or evolve, energy must in some way be introduced, gained or increased. The second law, however, says this will not happen in any natural process unless external factors enter in to produce it. This, in effect, acknowledges the validity of the creationist approach and not that of evolution. Various inadequate explanations for reconciling the second law with evolution have been offered, but creation doesn’t have to explain it. Instead, the creation model — the creation account in genesis — fits it perfectly.

Evolution poses an insurmountable difficulty for any christian serious about their faith. It is neither scientific by definition and it certainly isn’t good theology. The biblical god is not a god of chance and confusion, random combinations, natural selection and “survival of the fittest.” He is a sovereign god — sovereign in all matters of life. Evolution by definition denies this and repudiates the full scope of the work of god in jesus christ from the creation to the consummation. Clergy who fail to realize this end up proffering a “gospel” (which is no gospel at all) of randomness and uncertainty forever. They turn men from a god of creative purpose to a god of chance.

6. How do your colleagues seem to feel regarding evolution and its teaching? Are you in contact with any people who are pro-teaching evolution?

I believe most of my colleagues reject evolution by its definition and seek to counter it by their preaching and teaching. Nevertheless, some have adopted various theories such as the “gap theory,” “day age theory,” “theistic evolution,” etc. In order to try and reconcile the many claims of evolution against the bible. Though their intentions may be good — an effort to protect the integrity of the bible — i believe this a mistake, largely an act of panic, and completely unnecessary.

I am at times with people who espouse evolution. Whenever i have challenged their claims, however, i am often met with ridicule, sometimes with curiosity, and other times with a genuine desire to pursue the matter more. Sadly, most christians that i discuss the matter with seem to know very little about what evolution or the bible actually says.

7. How many americans does your denomination represent? How many americans are represented by more fundamentalist branches of christianity that would tend to oppose the teaching of evolution?

My denomination, southern baptist, has nearly 16 million americans as members. They are the largest baptist group, as well as the largest protestant denomination in the u.s. Fundamentalist christians, who typically oppose the teaching of evolution, make up about 25% of the american population.

Although i don’t know the purpose behind this question, i think it may be important to point out that truth is never determined by how many people believe it. Truth is absolute and totally independent of whether a majority or minority subscribes to it.

8. In sum: how much flexibility is there for reconciliation of faith and science, theoretically (independent of the religion) and specifically for christianity?

I do not believe that faith and science are actually hostile to one another. I do believe, however, that evolutionary theory is opposed to both faith and science.

Dr. D. James kennedy of coral ridge presbyterian church in his book, what if the bible had never been written rightly contends that science could have only developed in a christian civilization. It couldn’t have come from animists who believe that the things of nature have gods in them. Nor could it have come from islam with its strong assertions of fatalism. It most certainly couldn’t have come from buddhists or hindus because of their belief that the world is an illusion. Although there were incipient beginnings in greece, modern science was actually birthed in a christian civilization in western europe in the late middle ages. Modern science couldn’t have even been born in our own time because today man essentially believes life is irrational and illogical — and what’s the premise of that way of thinking? — evolution! Today, man rejects the idea of absolutes, and, therefore, actually rejects the very foundation of science. How can one have a valid scientific hypothesis if there are no absolutes? If there are no absolutes, then results of experimentation are all relative. This destroys science.

The early great scientists like Kepler, Galileo, and Newton shared the view that God was a God of reason who had created a rational universe, and by reason man could find out much about the universe’s design. The bible had a tremendous influence on their lives and their science. The same could be said concerning many other scientists in more recent times. The bible and christianity have been a tremendous help to science. Science has done much to lift the burden of the curse on nature because of man’s sin. Science and faith are not enemies of each other. Evolutionary theory, however, is the enemy of both. Evolution is the hostile agitator that seeks to drive them both apart.

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Rev. Mark H. Creech (Calact@Aol.Com) Is The Executive Director Of The Christian Action League Of North Carolina, Inc.

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Intelligent design goes Ivy League: Cornell offers course despite president denouncing theory (WorldNetDaily, 060411)

Cornell University plans to offer a course this summer on intelligent design, using textbooks by leading proponents of the controversial theory of origins.

The Ivy League school’s course – “Evolution and Design: Is There Purpose in Nature?” – aims to “sort out the various issues at play, and to come to clarity on how those issues can be integrated into the perspective of the natural sciences as a whole.”

The announcement comes just half a year after Cornell President Hunter Rawlings III denounced intelligent design as a “religious belief masquerading as a secular idea.”

Proponents of intelligent design say it draws on recent discoveries in physics, biochemistry and related disciplines that indicate some features of the natural world are best explained as the product of an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection. Supporters include scientists at numerous universities and science organizations worldwide.

Taught by senior lecturer Allen MacNeill of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department, Cornell’s four-credit seminar course will use books such as “Debating Design,” by William Dembski and Michael Ruse; and “Darwin’s Black Box,” by Michael Behe.

MacNeill plans to examine historical disputes surrounding evolution.

The university’s Intelligent Design Evolution Awareness club said that while it’s been on the opposite side of MacNeill in many debates, it has appreciated his “commitment to the ideal of the university as a free market-place of ideas.”

“We have found him always ready to go out of his way to encourage diversity of thought, and his former students speak highly of his fairness,” the group said. “We look forward to a course where careful examination of the issues and critical thinking is encouraged.”

Intelligent design has been virtually shut out of public high schools across the nation. In December, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones’ gave a stinging rebuke to a Dover, Pa., school board policy that required students of a ninth-grade biology class to hear a one-minute statement that says evolution is a theory, and intelligent design “is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view.”

Jones determined Dover board members violated the U.S. Constitution’s ban on congressional establishment of religion and charged that several members lied to cover their motives even while professing religious beliefs.

“The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy,” Jones wrote. “It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.”

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Nearly Half of Americans Believe in Creationism (Christian Post, 060606)

[KH: biased poll, including creationism with 10,000 years, a double question]

WASHINGTON — Almost half of Americans believe that human beings did not evolve, but were created by God in their present form within the last 10,000 years or so, results from a new Gallup Poll revealed.

In a May 8-11 survey of American beliefs on evolution, 46% of respondents agreed with the statement: God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.

In comparison, only 13% chose the answer: “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.”

According to the poll results, which were released Monday, the biggest factor in determining the answer was religion. Almost two-thirds of Americans who attend church at least once a week believe that humans were created in their present form, compared to 29% of those who say they never attend church.

Analysts also found a strong correlation between the level of education and the response. About three-quarters of those with a post-graduate degree said humans developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, compared to just 22% choosing the “created in present form” option.

According to Gallup, the poll shows that Americans’ view on the origin of life has remained constant for decades. Since 1982, when the poll first began, between 44 and 47% of Americans have consistently agreed with the option that God created humans in their present form, and between 9 and 13% believed man evolved without guidance from God. This was the seventh time the poll was conducted.

Meanwhile, 36% of Americans agreed with a third option, that man evolved with the guidance of God through millions of years.

Results are based on telephone interviews with 2,002 national adults from Nov. 7-10, 2004, and May 8-11, 2006. The margin of sampling error is 2%age points with 95% confidence.

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Experts: Missing Link in Bird Evolution Found (Foxnews, 060615)

WASHINGTON — Dozens of fossils of an ancient loon-like creature that some say is the missing link in bird evolution have been discovered in northwest China.

The remains of 40 of the nearly modern amphibious birds, so well-preserved that some even have their feathers, were found in Gansu province, researchers report in Friday’s issue of the journal Science. Previously only a single leg of the creature, known as Gansus yumenensis, had been found.

“Gansus is a missing link in bird evolution,” said Matt Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

“Most of the ancestors of birds from the age of dinosaurs are members of groups that died out and left no modern descendants. But Gansus led to modern birds, so it’s a link between primitive birds and those we see today,” Lamanna, a co-leader of the research team, said in a telephone interview.

It was about the size of a modern pigeon, but similar to loons or diving ducks, he explained, and one of the fossils even has skin preserved between the toes, showing that it had webbed feet.

“We were lucky far beyond our expectations” in finding these fossils, Hai-lu You of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences said at a briefing Thursday.

“A world lost for more than 100 million years was being revealed to us,” he said.

Previously there was a gap between ancient and modern species of birds, and “Gansus fits perfectly into this gap,” added Jerald D. Harris of Dixie State College in Utah.

“Gansus is the oldest example of the nearly modern birds that branched off of the trunk of the family tree that began with the famous proto-bird Archaeopteryx,” said Peter Dodson of the University of Pennsylvania, a co-author of the paper along with Lamanna, You and others.

The remains were dated to about 110 million years ago, making them the oldest for the group Ornithurae, which includes all modern birds and their closest extinct relatives. Previously, the oldest known fossils from this group were from about 99 million years ago.

The fact that Gansus was aquatic indicates that modern birds may have evolved from animals that originated in aquatic environments, the researchers said.

“Our new specimens are extremely well preserved, with some even including feathers,” Lamanna said. “Because these fossils are in such good condition, they’ve enabled us to reconstruct the appearance and relationships of Gansus with a high degree of precision. They provide new and important insight into the evolutionary transformation of carnivorous dinosaurs into the birds we know today.”

The remains were found in an ancient lake bed near the town of Changma. Researchers split open slabs of mudstone to find them. It was like turning the pages of a book, Lamanna said.

“We went to Changma hoping that we’d discover one, maybe two, fragments of fossil birds,” he said. “Instead, we found dozens, including some almost complete skeletons with soft tissues. We were successful beyond our wildest dreams.”

The new fossil material “is remarkable for its excellent preservation and establishes that Gansus is an early member of the Ornithurae. ... The new fossils demonstrate that Gansus clearly is a bird that spent much of its life looking for food in water,” commented Hans-Dieter Sues, associate director for research and collections at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Gansus is an additional “link in a long chain of intermediate forms between Archaeopteryx, the oldest known bird from the late Jurassic, and modern birds,” said Sues, who was not part of Lamanna’s research team.

Funding for the research was provided by the Discovery Quest program for The Science Channel, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Dixie State College of Utah, the Chinese Geological Survey and the Ministry of Science and Technology of China.

At one point during the field work, Lamanna told his colleagues he would eat a duck foot if they found the fossil they were seeking while the television camera crew was still there.

So, did they?

“It tasted sort of like chicken, but real rubbery,” he recalled.

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Anti-Evolution Standards a Key Issue in Kansas School Board Races (Christian Post, 060723)

BURDETT, Kan. (AP) - After a potluck lunch in one of many hamlets dotting the Great Plains, candidate Sally Cauble confronted a key issue in Kansas politics: whether schools should teach students to doubt evolution.

Cauble wants to oust incumbent Connie Morris from the State Board of Education in the Aug. 1 Republican primary. Five races this year could remove half the board’s members, undo its conservative majority and doom anti-evolution science standards that brought Kansas international criticism.

Cauble hoped to pick up a few votes in Burdett, a town of 240 people, about 130 miles northwest of Wichita, just off a two-lane state highway, surrounded by fields and best known for being the hometown of the astronomer who discovered the planet Pluto.

When asked by Cleo Gorman, a 68-year-old nurse, about “the science issue,” Cauble said she would not have supported the anti-evolution standards.

“To be a scientific theory, it has to be tested. It has to be measured, and then other scientific data is tested against that,” Cauble said. “The science of evolution has gone through that, and it has been tested.”

But Gorman disagreed and is inclined to vote for Morris, who once wrote in a constituent newsletter that evolution is an “age-old fairy tale.”

“Evolution is not proven as much as they thought it was,” Gorman told Cauble.

Later, Cauble said she wished evolution weren’t an issue. Yet the former teacher and ex-school board member from Liberal contends the conservative-led state board has damaged Kansas’ image.

“I believe they’ve lost their effectiveness because they have lost respect,” she said.

Morris, an author and former teacher from St. Francis, sees criticism of the board generated by the media, not most Kansans.

“I may not win the election, but at least I spoke for the people,” Morris said recently before preparing a booth at the Ellis County Fair in Hays.

A Nationwide Debate

Although most scientists don’t question its validity, evolution still generates heated debate political and legal debates across the nation.

A suburban Atlanta school district’s put stickers in 35,000 textbooks declaring evolution “a theory, not a fact,” leading to a federal lawsuit that’s still pending after four years. This year, Ohio rescinded standards hailed by intelligent design advocates.

Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher called intelligent design a “self-evident truth” in a January speech. Last year, in Dover, Pa., voters ousted school board members who had required the biology curriculum to include intelligent design, a policy a federal judge later struck down as a government endorsement of a particular religious view.

Control of the Kansas school board has slipped into, out of and back into conservative Republicans’ hands since 1998, resulting in anti-evolution standards for student testing in 1999, evolution-friendly ones in 2001 and anti-evolution ones again last year.

If conservatives retain control this year, it’s likely to be read as a victory for intelligent design supporters.

“There are people around the country who would like to see the Kansas standards in their own states, said Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, Calif.

Scott, a critic of the standards, said conservative victories in Kansas would “embolden efforts to clone these standards elsewhere.”

The Intelligent Design Argument

Critics believe Kansas’ standards promote intelligent design, which says some features of the universe are so well-ordered and complex that they’re best explained by an intelligent cause. Proponents contend the standards encourage an open discussion of evolution and its flaws.

“Students need to have an accurate assessment of the state of the facts in regard to Darwin’s theory,” said John West, a vice president for the Center for Science and Culture at the Seattle-based, anti-evolution Discovery Institute.

The standards contain a disclaimer saying they’re not promoting intelligent design, which critics view as repackaged creationism.

But the standards say evolutionary theory that all life had a common origin has been challenged by fossils and molecular biology. And, they say, there’s controversy over whether changes over time in one species can lead to a new species. Both statements echo intelligent design arguments, defying mainstream science.

Of course, some Kansans simply don’t believe in evolution.

“Personally, I don’t think we ought to teach evolution at all,” Chuck Warner, a 53-year-old from Smith County. “But if that’s the way it has to be, then I think we ought to be able to teach Christianity and the Bible, too.”

Ryan Cole, 26, has no problem with teaching intelligent design.

“I feel like if you give two sides of something, most people are intelligent enough to make up their own minds,” he said.

Cole believes his thinking is widespread in Morris’ sprawling district, which covers all or part of 41 western Kansas counties.

But Richard Barrows, 58, thinks the conservative majority is out of step, attributing its ascendancy to past voter apathy.

“It’s just the perfect example of how, if you ignore

The Political Battle

The Discovery Institute is waging a Web campaign to build support for Kansas’ science standards. Other, Kansas-based groups are becoming directly involved in board elections.

The Kansas Republican Assembly, a conservative group, has four political action committees that raised almost $46,000 in 2005, according to campaign finance records.

Three groups opposing conservatives - the Kansas Alliance for Education, MAIN PAC (for mainstream) and the Kansas Traditional Republican Majority - raised about $95,000, including $25,000 from the Kansas-National Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union. It also could contribute directly to candidates.

“Teachers want this board to return to common sense,” said Mark Desetti, a KNEA lobbyist.

Still, state board races have remained heavy on speeches to small groups, booths at county fairs and appearances in local parades. Morris keeps a laundry basket in her car, full of trinkets to throw to children watching parades, and in 2002, she spent only about $16,000 on her campaign, despite the size of her 5th District.

“I think that people just agree that the theory of evolution needs to be challenged,” she said. “It makes sense. It’s good science.”

When Cauble visited Burdett, she brought a copy of a Time magazine story headlined, “Reconciling God and Science.” She told one audience member she’s a committed Methodist.

“There are many of us who believe that God created the heavens and the earth - and I believe that very strongly,” she said. “But I believe that you can believe that, and you can still believe in evolution.”

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Leading Biologist Urges Scientific Skeptics to Investigate God: Human Genome Project Head Also Says Opposition To Evolution Undermines The Credibility (Christian Post, 060723)

[KH: Caution: pro-evolution Christian. His argument is that the missing gaps will be filled eventually; but not even one has been discovered in the last 140 years after Darwin.]

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. (AP) – He opened the session by improvising on hymns at the piano and concluded it by accompanying a sing-along on the guitar. In between, he delivered a compelling account of his unlikely conversion from atheism to evangelical Christianity.

The lanky, amiable platform personality wasn’t some traveling revivalist but one of the world’s leading biologists.

Francis S. Collins led the international Human Genome Project that mapped the 3.1 billion chemical base pairs in humanity’s DNA. He now directs the U.S. government program on applying that information to medical treatments.

He’s also emerged as a surprise advocate for faith and for its compatibility with science.

The 56-year-old Collins addressed the clash of science and religion last weekend during a conference at Williams College sponsored by the C.S. Lewis Foundation – appropriately so, since the writings of the English literature scholar were instrumental in Collins’ conversion.

He pursues the theme again next week at a Calvin College convention of the American Scientific Affiliation. The organization of scientists affirms “the divine inspiration, trustworthiness and authority of the Bible” on faith and morals. Collins is a member.

But his most complete argument for God appears in a new book, “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief” (Free Press), which addresses two radically divergent audiences:

• He asks scientific skeptics to investigate God with the same open-minded zeal they apply to the natural world, assuring them there’s no incompatibility between belief and scientific rigor.

• He tells fellow evangelicals that opposition to evolution – whether the biblical literalism of creationists or “intelligent design” arguments – undermines the credibility of faith. He finds the first “fundamentally flawed” and warns that the second builds upon gaps in evidence that scientists are very likely to fill in the future, among other objections.

The audience of 200 at Williams gave Collins’ views a respectful reception, quite in contrast to a previous frosty reaction he got when he told a national meeting of Christian physicians the evidence for evolution is “overwhelming.”

But scientists are probably the tougher audience. According to Nature, the science weekly, “many scientists disagree strongly” with Collins-style arguments and critics feel “more talk of religion is the last thing that science needs.”

Surveys have indicated 40% of scientists are religious, Collins remarked in an interview before the conference, but “if 40% of my own scientific colleagues are believers in a personal God, they’re keeping pretty quiet about it.”

“For a scientist, it’s uncomfortable to admit there are questions that your scientific method isn’t going to be able to address,” he said. Besides, scientists are busy and focused – they often don’t take the time to explore “these more profound eternal questions.”

In his talk, Collins said he was raised by nonreligious parents and turned into “an obnoxious atheist.” But as a medical student he wondered why patients who were suffering and dying retained faith in God.

He realized that as a scientist “you’re not supposed to decide something is true until you’ve looked at the data. And yet I had become an atheist without ever looking at the evidence whether God exists or not.”

He began looking, and early in the process read Lewis’ concise classic “Mere Christianity.”

“In the very first chapter,” he said, “all my arguments about the irrationality of faith lay in ruins.”

Yet he was besieged by doubts during two years of struggle and study. Finally, he went hiking in Oregon’s Cascades Mountains and one morning, “I fell on my knees and asked Christ to be my Lord and Savior. And he has been there ever since, the past 28 years, as the rock on which I stand.”

Unimpressed by denominational differences, Collins has worshipped in a variety of Protestant churches while living the itinerant life of an academic. He became a Methodist at the University of North Carolina, an American Baptist at Yale, a Southern Baptist at the University of Michigan and currently belongs to Fourth Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, Md.

Collins writes that “it is time to call a truce in the escalating war between science and spirit,” in which the dominant voices have belonged to narrow, anti-God materialists and believers who spurn orthodox science.

He says both approaches are “profoundly dangerous. Both deny truth. Both will diminish the nobility of humankind. Both will be devastating to our future. And both are unnecessary.”

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Deliver us from chaos (townhall.com, 060727)

By Marvin Olasky

Some public relations pros don’t twist and shout. They truly subscribe to John Milton’s faith from the 1640s that truth and falsehood should be allowed to grapple, for truth would not lose “in a free and open encounter.” But others try to snuff out that “open encounter” — and that’s the trouble with what’s happening on the eve of Kansas’s Aug. 1 GOP primary.

A bit of background: 22 years ago I interviewed a remarkable fellow, Edward Bernays (1891-1995), nephew of Sigmund Freud and founder as a young man of modern public relations. Bernays was 93 when we talked and full of memories of famous clients ranging from tobacco industry poobahs (he convinced women to embrace smoking as an expression of their liberation) to Eleanor Roosevelt. Their photos decorated the walls of his house near Harvard.

Bernays said he had no belief in God but a strong faith in what he had declared openly six decades before: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

He proudly considered himself one of “the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses.” He was proud to “pull the wires which control the public mind” so that “vast numbers of human beings ... live together as a smoothly functioning society.” The politically-liberal Bernays considered himself, even as he tried to make millions of people his puppets, a defender of democracy: If he didn’t act as he did, the dark night of fascism would descend on America.

In the 1930s, with Hitler and Mussolini in power across the ocean, and Depression-driven fears animating many domestically, Bernays’ concerns were not irrational. But what about now? The Bush administration’s attempts to intercept terrorist communications and financial transfers don’t bother me. That seems like the minimum of due diligence required when the bin Ladens of the world are taking us to and beyond the eve of destruction.

Still, even if Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Gonzalez endangers our liberty, is there also a vast Bush-led conspiracy to take away the opportunity for children to become proficient in science? That’s what the Campaign to Defend the Constitution (DefCon) would have us believe. In true Bernaysian fashion, DefCon wants to “highlight the threat the religious right poses to our children’s education and ... prevent the erosion of science.”

Here’s DefCon’s problem of the week: The state of Kansas has curriculum standards that “call for students to learn about the best evidence for modern evolutionary theory but also to learn about areas where scientists are raising scientific criticisms of the theory.” Is that a crime? Maybe. DefCon and another group with a euphonious name, Kansas Citizens for Science, are propagandizing voters to kick conservatives and moderates off the Kansas Board of Education next Tuesday.

The Kansas board had acted moderately: It has just wanted schools to “teach the debate” about evolution. It’s strange: Science is all about asking questions, so how is a group “for science” when it wants to cut off even the tiniest amount of question-asking? The attempt to scare voters into purging the Kansas Board of Education only makes sense in Bernaysian terms. “We have no being in the air to watch over us,” he told me, so we need “human gods” to preserve us from “chaos.”

Bernays saw Judaism and Christianity as potent lies that had to be fought by PR folks such as himself who would “make the public believe that human gods are watching over us.” Today, those “human gods” are the scientific establishment. Questions about Darwinism suggest the possibility that some “being in the air” might be involved — and if we fall for such a myth, according to Bernays, we end up in chaos.

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‘Creation Museum’ Seeks to Disprove Evolution, Paleontology, Geology (Foxnews, 060801)

PETERSBURG, Ky. — Like most natural history museums, this one has exhibits showing dinosaurs roaming the Earth. Except here, the giant reptiles share the forest with Adam and Eve.

That, of course, is contradicted by science, but that’s the point of the $25 million Creation Museum rising fast in rural Kentucky.

Its inspiration is the Bible — the literal interpretation that contends God created the heavens and the Earth and everything in them just a few thousand years ago.

“If the Bible is the word of God, and its history really is true, that’s our presupposition or axiom, and we are starting there,” museum founder Ken Ham said during recent tour of the sleek and modern facility, which is due to open next year.

Ham, an Australian native who started the Christian publishing company Answers in Genesis in the late 1970s, said the goal of his privately funded museum is to change minds and rebut the scientific point of view.

“We’re going to show you that we can make sense of the different people groups, we can make sense of fossils, we can make sense of what you see in the world,” he said.

Visitors to the museum, a few miles from Cincinnati, will be able to watch the story of creation unfold in a 180-seat special-effects theater, see a 40-foot-tall recreation of a section of Noah’s Ark and stare into the jaws of robotic dinosaurs.

“It’s education, but it’s also doing it in an entertaining way,” Ham said.

Scientists say fossils and sophisticated nuclear dating technology show that the Earth is more than 4 billion years old, the first dinosaurs appeared around 200 million years ago, and they died out well before the first human ancestors arose a few million years ago.

“Genesis is not science,” said Mary Dawson, curator emeritus of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. “Genesis is a tale that was handed down for generations by people who really knew nothing about science, who knew nothing about natural history, and certainly knew nothing about what fossils were.”

Ham said he believes most fossils are the result of the Great Flood described in Genesis.

Mark Looy, a vice president at Answers in Genesis, said the museum has received at least $21 million in private donations. He said two anonymous donors have given $1 million, and he expects the museum to be debt-free when it opens next May.

John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego, an organization that promotes creationism, said the museum will affirm the doubts many people have about science, namely the notion that man evolved from lower forms of life.

“Americans just aren’t gullible enough to believe that they came from a fish,” he said.

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Censoring Science: The Kansas Controversy (Christian Post, 060808)

By Chuck Colson

The headline was positively gleeful. On the website of the left-wing group DefCon this week, we read: “Science Wins the Day in Kansas.”

In fact, just the opposite happened. Science lost in Kansas to zealots who want to keep kids in the dark about the scientific controversy over evolution.

In last week’s school board primary election in Kansas, two conservatives who support teaching the evidence both for and against evolution lost to candidates who oppose such teaching. These losses mean Kansas will now have an anti-science majority: members who want to slam the door on free academic inquiry.

One can hardly blame the citizens of Kansas for not knowing what they were voting for. The press attacked as “anti-science” those who support a more comprehensive teaching of evolution. They were aided and abetted by an outfit called Kansas Citizens for Science, which told blatant lies about the current science standards. For example, it claimed the standards mandated instruction about intelligent design—even though they do not. It accused conservative school board candidates of being “intellectually challenged” and “religiously motivated.” In reality, conservative board members back science standards written by people who hold doctoral degrees in the life sciences.

Unfortunately, the smear tactics worked. And the question I have is, who paid for this massive campaign? That’s something we ought to find out.

But for now it’s censorship. Students will not be allowed to learn, for example, about Dr. Michael Behe’s theory of irreducible complexity. They will not be told that the teachings of origins is controversial because really it is not science, but about the philosophy of naturalism. There is no verifiable science about how life began—something students will not be told.

Why do strident secularists want to keep kids in the dark? It’s because if there is evidence of intelligence in the universe, the secularist orthodoxy is undermined, and they cannot allow even raising those questions—hence, the dishonest claims and the inflammatory rhetoric.

Richard Dawkins, the Oxford professor, is a fierce Darwinist because, as he says, it makes it intellectually respectable to be an atheist. You see, secularists don’t care what Christians believe as long as we keep those beliefs to ourselves. But the minute we take those beliefs into the public square, challenging secularist orthodoxy with provable truth claims—like evidence of intelligent design in the universe—they go ballistic.

The good news is that, despite the setback in Kansas, kids will not be in the dark for long. According to a Virginia Commonwealth University survey, 73% of Americans want schools to teach both sides. So, if we get the truth out, in a fair election we win.

Second, the controversy itself may even stimulate the curiosity of kids. They will want to know what “the authorities” are banning from their classrooms. If you know of such kids, direct them to the Discovery Institute website, or give them the new book by Jonathan Wells called The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. Or have them come to our website, www.breakpoint.org.

The war over evolution teaching is not about pitting religion against science, as the Darwinist lobby claims; it’s about opposing bad science with better science. If schools will not admit it, you can equip yourself to teach it to your kids at home.

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Darwinian Fairytales: Of Rats and Men (Christian Post, 060824)

By Chuck Colson

A recent New York Times story described an experiment involving two colonies of rats: The first were bred for tameness. The second colony, “bred from exactly the same stock,” was wired to be aggressive. The results were described as the “sweetest cartoon animal” and “the most evil super-villain.” Whereas the tame rats poked their noses through the cage to be petted, the others “hurl themselves screaming toward their bars.”

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Chuck Colson

The researchers’ goal in breeding lovable and villainous rats was to understand how human beings domesticated previously wild animals like horses and cattle. They hypothesize that the characteristic that made domestication possible, tameness, is genetic in origin. Breeding tame and aggressive rat colonies is a step toward identifying what they call a “tameness gene,” which they presume is “the same in all species of domesticated mammals.”

If the article had stopped there, it would have been interesting in a National Geographic sort of way. But they then went on to speculate that humans might possess such a “tameness gene,” and that this gene contributed to our “domestication.” The theory goes that those with the “tameness gene” “penalized or ostracized individuals who were too aggressive.”

Let’s set aside the obvious objection that there’s no proof that such a gene exists in rats, much less humans. The bigger problem, as one science writer put it, is the idea that human civilization is the product of a hypothetical “nice rat, nasty rat,” or in this case, “nice human, nasty human,” gene.

This experiment would have come as no surprise to the late philosopher Michael Stove. He would have regarded the idea that we are nothing but the sum of our genes and the dangerous belief that we can fix our race by genetic engineering as yet another one of Darwinism’s “unbelievable claims.”

Stove’s critique of these claims was recently published in a book titled Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution. Stove, who called himself a man of “no religion,” acknowledged Darwin’s “great genius” and admitted that natural selection had great explanatory power when it came to “sponges, snakes and flies.”

However, Stove regarded Darwinism as a “ridiculous slander to human beings.” Flesh-and-blood people do not act in any ways resembling what the Darwinian dogma says they should. For instance, natural selection dictates that “every organism has as many descendants as it can.” Stove asks, “Do you know anyone of whom that’s true?”

Likewise, Darwin insisted that natural selection would “rigidly destroy” any variation that would hurt its possessor “in the struggle for life.” Stove replied, “start with the letter ‘A’: Abortion, Alcoholism, or even Altruism.” Are any of these “variations” being “rigidly destroyed”?

These are two of the many ways Darwinism gets humans wrong. Yet, as the Times story illustrates, this dismal track record has not stopped Darwinists from slandering humans (whether by reducing our vices and virtues to genetic determinism or by comparing us to laboratory rats).

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Nearly Complete ‘Missing Link’ Skeleton Found in Ethiopia (Foxnews, 060920)

NEW YORK — In a discovery sure to fuel an old debate about our evolutionary history, scientists have found a remarkably complete skeleton of a 3-year-old female from the ape-man species represented by “Lucy.”

The remains found in Africa are 3.3 million years old, making this the oldest known skeleton of such a youthful human ancestor.

“It’s a pretty unbelievable discovery... It’s sensational,” said Will Harcourt-Smith, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History in New York who wasn’t involved in the find. “It provides you with a wealth of information.”

For one thing, it gives new evidence for a contentious feud about whether this species, which walked upright, also climbed and moved through trees easily.

The species is Australopithecus afarensis, which lived in Africa between about 4 million and 3 million years ago. The most famous afarensis is Lucy, discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, a creature that lived about 100,000 years after the newfound specimen.

The new find is reported in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature by Zeresenay Alemseged of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany; Fred Spoor, professor of evolutionary anatomy at University College London, and others.

The skeleton was discovered in 2000 in northeastern Ethiopia. Scientists have spent five painstaking years removing the bones from sandstone, and the job will take years more to complete.

Judging by how well it was preserved, the skeleton may have come from a body that was quickly buried by sediment in a flood, the researchers said.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime find,” said Spoor.

The skeleton has been nicknamed “Selam,” which means “peace” in several Ethiopian languages.

Most scientists believe afarensis stood upright and walked on two feet, but they argue about whether it had ape-like agility in trees.

That climbing ability would require anatomical equipment like long arms, and afarensis had arms that dangled down to just above the knees.

The question is whether such features indicate climbing ability or just evolutionary baggage. The loss of that ability would suggest crossing a threshold toward a more human existence.

Spoor said so far, analysis of the new fossil hasn’t settled the argument but does seem to indicate some climbing ability.

While the lower body is very human-like, he said, the upper body is ape-like:

— The shoulder blades resemble those of a gorilla rather than a modern human.

— The neck seems short and thick like a great ape’s, rather than the more slender version humans have to keep the head stable while running.

— The organ of balance in the inner ear is more ape-like than human.

— The fingers are very curved, which could indicate climbing ability, “but I’m cautious about that,” Spoor said.

Curved fingers have been noted for afarensis before, but their significance is in dispute.

A big question is what the foot bones will show when their sandstone casing is removed, he said. Will there be a grasping big toe like the opposable thumb of a human hand? Such a chimp-like feature would argue for climbing ability, he said.

Yet, to resolve the debate, scientists may have to find a way to inspect vanishingly small details of such old bones, to get clues to how those bones were used in life, he said.

Bernard Wood of George Washington University, who didn’t participate in the discovery, said in an interview that the fossil provides strong evidence of climbing ability.

But he also agreed that it won’t settle the debate among scientists, which he said “makes the Middle East look like a picnic.”

Overall, he wrote in a Nature commentary, the discovery provides “a veritable mine of information about a crucial stage in human evolutionary history.”

The fossil revealed just the second hyoid bone to be recovered from any human ancestor. This tiny bone, which attaches to the tongue muscles, is very chimp-like in the new specimen, Spoor said.

While that doesn’t directly reveal anything about language, it does suggest that whatever sounds the creature made “would appeal more to a chimpanzee mother than a human mother,” Spoor said.

The fossil find includes the complete skull, including an impression of the brain and the lower jaw, all the vertebrae from the neck to just below the torso, all the ribs, both shoulder blades and both collarbones, the right elbow and part of a hand, both knees and much of both shin and thigh bones.

One foot is almost complete, providing the first time scientists have found an afarensis foot with the bones still positioned as they were in life, Spoor said.

The work was funded by the National Geographic Society, the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, the Leakey Foundation and the Planck institute.

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Darwin’s Nemesis: Unlikely Champion (Christian Post, 061004)

By Chuck Colson

How do you honor a man who started a groundbreaking movement that challenged the scientific establishment and is changing the way the world thinks about the origins of life?

Phillip Johnson’s friends came up with a great way to answer that question. In honor of Phil’s many accomplishments, they have commissioned and published a collection of essays, in a book titled Darwin’s Nemesis. That’s the perfect title, because that’s exactly what Phil has become over the past fifteen years. This feisty Berkeley law professor became the unlikely spearhead of the intelligent design movement with the publication of his book Darwin on Trial, in which, from the perspective of a skilled lawyer, he examined and cross-examined Darwinism and found gaping holes. His legal and rhetorical training had convinced him that the Darwinists were acting like people with “something to hide.” Indeed, they are.

His investigation showed him exactly what they were hiding. As geophysicist Stephen Meyer puts it, the best Darwinists can put forth is “a panoply of euphemism and wishful thinking masquerading as evidence.” So Phil dared to start questioning what many believed to be unquestionable and to enlist many scientists to start questioning it as well. The rest, as they say, is history.

Through all the controversy—and just plain mud-slinging—that followed the publishing of Darwin on Trial, Phil has maintained his stance, continuing his lawyerly probing and careful research, and he has kept his good humor and graciousness. In these ways, he serves as a magnificent example to all of us involved in worldview teaching.

Just the list of authors who have contributed to Darwin’s Nemesis shows the effectiveness of Phil’s approach. It’s full of essays by distinguished scientists and philosophers who support the intelligent design movement. And it even includes a couple of articles by critics of intelligent design, including philosophy professor and evolution advocate Michael Ruse—the kind of balance you’d like to see in classrooms. In the contentious debate that surrounds the intelligent design vs. evolution issue, getting the participation of someone like Ruse is a testimony to Phillip Johnson.

There’s no doubt that Phil’s willingness to encourage the work of scientists and help create a network for them has allowed the movement to flourish. This book really shows just how far the intelligent design (ID) movement has progressed in a relatively short time, despite the best efforts of many Darwinists to shoot it down—because, as is becoming clearer and clearer, ID has the evidence on its side.

But Darwin’s Nemesis is far more than a tribute to one man—it’s an insightful, enjoyable, highly readable explanation of the intelligent design movement as a whole. And as the passages I’ve quoted demonstrate, this is very much in keeping with Philip Johnson’s practice of keeping the focus on the movement and the questions it is asking, not on himself. The paradox is that by doing this, he has shown how one informed and dedicated individual can literally shape the course of history—just one more lesson from Phil Johnson’s work from which we all can benefit, and one more reason why he’s one of my personal heroes.

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What Has Darwin to Do with Shakespeare? A Meaningful World (Christian Post, 061013)

By Chuck Colson

Over the years, you’ve heard me recommend many publications on the subject of intelligent design. But I believe it is safe to say that I have never before discussed one that featured two chapters on Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

The reasoning behind these chapters is that Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt’s new book, A Meaningful World, is about so much more than the narrow concept that many people have of “intelligent design.” Their book’s subtitle helps explain their idea: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature. It’s an original and utterly fascinating approach to the subject.

Wiker and Witt are arguing against what they call the “poison” of our time: reductionist materialism and the nihilism that stems from it. To put it more simply, they are fighting against the idea that the universe is without meaning. We’ve all heard this idea before, but we don’t always realize just how much it has permeated our culture and our lives.

Which brings me back to Shakespeare. Most of us have heard someone say that “if a million monkeys banged away on typewriters for a million years, eventually they would generate the entire works of Shakespeare.” I have tended to laugh this off as most of us do, not aware that the people who embrace reductionist materialism are really serious.

As Wiker and Witt explain it, “Reductionist materialism seeks to give an entirely material explanation of human intelligence, one that reduces it to a string of pointless material causes. It must kill the soul, and in the process, reduce all the evident genius of humanity to dust.”

And that, the authors show us, is exactly why materialists came up with the “million monkeys” idea. Scientific reductionism—the view that we all came into being by random chance—is closely linked to literary reductionism—the desire to “force the beauties of [literature] into [a] box.”

Thus, scientists came up with the “million monkeys” theory to show that Shakespeare’s genius was nothing special, that his works could have come about purely by chance. And, the theory goes, “If monkeys could knock out a Shakespearean tragedy given enough time, then what about creating Shakespeare himself? Couldn’t he be almost as easily explained on Darwinian grounds?”

But do you know what happened when scientists tried to test their theory? Obviously, they couldn’t test it for a million years, but they thought they could get some idea about the truth of the theory by testing it for a month. The monkeys pressed some random letters on the keyboard, bashed the computer with stones, and—to put it as delicately as possible—used it as a toilet. “Suffice it to say,” the authors remark dryly, “their literary efforts fall a good deal short of the Bard.” It’s difficult to see how extending this farce for a million years would have made any difference at all. In fact, a scientist at MIT used a computer simulation to prove that it could not have happened.

This is only the beginning of Witt and Wiker’s exploration of their theme. Tomorrow, Mark Earley will be with you to take a look at their argument that not only do the arts and culture point to a universe full of meaning, but so do mathematics and the sciences.

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Leading Intelligent Design Proponent Challenges Darwin (Christian Post, 061123)

MCLEAN, Va. – While intelligent design is a familiar term to many Americans, not many could say they heard first-hand a scientific explanation from the man who some call the “poster boy” of intelligent design.

Michael Behe, the author of Christianity Today’s 1996 Book of the year - Darwin’s Black Box - challenged Darwin’s theory of evolution by presenting his famed “irreducible complexity” argument at a recent apologetics conference at McLean Bible Church.

The argument says that there are some biological systems composed of multiple parts that are “irreducibly complex,” so that the removal of any one part of the system will cause it to cease functioning. Therefore, the system could not have evolved step by step.

This argument - which has been widely debated in academic circles following the release of Behe’s book– directly challenges Darwin’s theory of evolution which conceded that “if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” In other words, evolution required gradual, successive steps and can “never take a great and sudden leap” according to Darwin.

Behe used the mouse trap example to illustrate “irreducible complexity.” He said that a mousetrap is composed of five basic parts: the wood platform, hammer, catch, holding bar, and spring. All five parts are essential for the trap to work and the trap does not work half as well if one part is missing but it is simply broken.

“With ‘irreducible complex’ systems, the function appears, pretty much, when the system is completely put together,” explained Behe. “It doesn’t appear gradually. So things like this are a big problem for Darwinian theories.”

The intelligent design proponent then pointed to biological, cellular, and biochemical system that have “irreducible complexity.” He showed a slide of the bacteria flagellum as an “irreducible complex” system and said that the removal of the drive shaft, propeller, or any parts would cause the system to not function.

“The bottom line is we have strong evidence for real design and little evidence for Darwinism,” concluded Behe.

He summarized his argument as:

• Design is not mystical but deduced from physical structure of a system

• Everyone agrees aspects of biology appear designed

• There are structural obstacles to Darwinian evolution

• Grand Darwinian claims rest on undisciplined imagination

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Intelligent Design Defended by Unsolved Genetic Puzzle (Christian Post, 061117)

MCLEAN, Va. – A distinguished Christian professor of science and religion defended Intelligent Design by presenting an unsolved genetic puzzle on Thursday during a three-day apologetics conference at McLean Bible Church.

Dr. Paul Nelson, a Biola professor and apologist, approached the heavily debated theory of Intelligent Design from a biological angle. He set out on an intense 45-minute session entitled “Intelligent Design in Three Easy Steps” to argue that science supports the idea that an intelligent being designed the universe.

“I want to remind you that you don’t need a theory of design to know that is design,” said Nelson. “The reality of detecting intelligence doesn’t require a theory. A theory is a nice thing to have, certainly if we are going to apply this to biology, but design inferences are sound and stable even if we don’t have a fully articulated theory.”

The apologist outlined that there are three main issues for Christians to keep in mind when they approach people skeptical of theism, Christianity, and Intelligent Design (I.D.). First, Christians need to realize that part of basic human rationality detects action of intelligence. The second step, which was the main focus of Nelson’s workshop, is to look carefully at the evidence. Lastly, step three calls for people to ignore philosophical rules.

Nelson gave his colleague William Dembski’s basic definition of Intelligent Design as the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as a result of intelligence. To explain the first step, the apologist listed emails, Stonehenge, and monuments in Washington as examples that are “clearly the products of intelligence” that would be “irrational” to explain otherwise.

For most of the evening, Nelson used specific examples of genes, enzymes, proteins, and cells with a focus on ORFan (open reading frame) genes, which are sequences of DNA that codes for protein.

Nelson looked at a pattern in biology that pointed strongly to design and challenged Darwin’s theory of common descent. Darwin said that if there were systems in nature that could not be arrived at by some gradual means or process then his theory could be reasonably doubted; the evolution theory requires gradual steps in biological developments.

To challenge Darwin’s theory of evolution and defend I.D., Nelson focused on the growing discovery of new ORFan genes that are not in the GenBank database.

Nearly one-third of the protein-coding genes of mycoplasma, the simplest “free-living thing” up until last year, are unknown genes or ORFans. The questions that result from these discoveries are where did all these genetic information come from and why are they specific to one bacteria if according to Darwin’s theory of common descent they have to derive from a common ancestor?

“On an evolutionary view of life, all living things on earth share a common ancestor,” said Nelson. “Where are the similar sequences that gave rise to these ORFan genes? Where are the necessary intermediates that must have been there? Where are the parents, if you will, of these mysterious genetic words?”

Nelson said that if the theory of evolution were completely true, then there “must” be a way to reconstruct evolutionary history of every gene and protein and we would not expect so many unknown genes or proteins.

“The intelligent design debate has nothing to do with the evidence,” concluded Nelson. “It has everything to do with what we are going to let that evidence tell us.

“Is it possible that life did not derive strictly from natural causes but it was intelligently designed? Of course it is possible. What is the problem? The problem is not [with] the evidence from biology, but the problem is what are we going to let that evidence tell us?”

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Ancient Skeleton Pits Christians Against Scientists (Christian Post, 070208)

A prehistoric skeleton found in Kenya has sparked a new round of creation versus evolution debate between Christians and Scientists.

Kenyan evangelical leaders are demanding that Turkana boy – the most complete prehistoric human ever found – be place in a backroom with a sign cautioning that evolution is a theory during the upcoming exhibit at the famed National Museum of Kenya.

“I did not evolve from Turkana Boy or anything like it,” says Bishop Boniface Adoyo, who is heading a campaign against evolution, according to The Associated Press. “These sorts of silly views are killing our faith.”

Adoyo, who chairs the nine million-membered Evangelical Alliance of Kenya, is calling on his followers to boycott the exhibit.

Turkana Boy’s well-known founder, Richard Leakey, is disturbed by efforts to hide the exhibit’s fossils.

“The church is being ridiculous,” said Leakey according to Guardian Unlimited. “Its leaders are out of step. Evolution theory is accepted across the world. This is scientific history and Kenya has the best of this evolutional history.”

Meanwhile, in the United States, Christians are taking another approach to the evolution debate. Though still defending creation, many Christians are now using scientific evidence and language to defend biblical view of the beginning of mankind and the universe.

Answers in Genesis, the world’s largest Christian apologetics ministry, will open its $27-million new museum designed to defend creation by examining fossils, animals, stars and natural science.

“The Bible, where it touches on science or any subject including same-sex marriage, race or abortion, is totally trustworthy,” said Ken Ham, co-founder and president of Answers in Genesis, in a statement. “As a revelation of history from the beginning to the end of time, the Bible is the foundation that enables us to construct the big picture and have the right approach in geology, biology, physics and astronomy.”

Visitors are escorted through exhibits of life-sized, realistic animatronic dinosaurs and humans, planetarium, a cave with real stalactites and stalagmites growing, archaeological digs, a Time Tunnel, and other features - all with the focus to prove the Bible can withstand scientific scrutiny.

“Today, science is pointing more powerfully to a creator than any other time,” said award-winning Christian author Lee Strobel, in his documentary “The Case for a Creator.” “The most logical and rational step is to put my faith in the Creator that science tells me exists.”

Many Christian scientists have joined the intelligent design movement in the United States, challenging Darwin’s evolution theory, arguing that science discoveries prove the existence of a higher power and creation.

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Churches Reconcile Evolution, Creation Ahead of Darwin’s Birthday (Christian Post, 070212)

[KH: here the Episcopal Church goes again!]

Evolution and creation, two belief systems often pitted against one another, were celebrated side by side in hundreds of churches on Evolution Sunday.

The annual observance took place a day ahead of Darwin’s birthday and was a time for some churches to reconcile the religious and scientific explanations on the origin of life. Instead of rejecting one interpretation in support of another, some churches have declared that evolution and creation can co-exist.

“Science answers the questions ‘How ...?’ Religion answers the question ‘Why …?’” said Rev. Noreen Suriner, pastor of Trinity Memorial Episcopal Church in Binghamton, N.Y, according to the Press & Sun-Bulletin. “They are two different questions, but they are not mutually exclusive. We can embrace both.”

As many as 596 congregations in 50 states had opted to celebrate Evolution Sunday, according to organizers of the observance.

Evolution Sunday began from a statement signed by academics and clergy in support of teaching evolution in public schools in 2004.

Michael Zimmerman, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Butler University and key organizer of the project, said “science is very real and there’s no reason to believe it conflicts with basic Christianity or any other religion,” according to the Press & Sun-Bulletin.

Some Christian scientists joining the evolution-creation debate, called for a closer examination of the science behind the creation story to resolve the conflict between evolution and creation.

Joan Roughgarden, an evolutionary biologist at Stanford University and an Episcopalian, questioned, “When Genesis talks about humans being made from mud, does that mean we are made from the mud one finds in a marsh? Or does that mean we come from a common substance,” according to the San Jose Mercury News.

Roughgarden, who recently debated outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins, noted that the commonality might be our DNA.

The project has garnered more than 10,000 signatures from clergies – mainly from mainline denominations – according to the project’s website.

Evolution, however, has not been welcomed by all Christians.

In Kenya, tempers are rising over a prehistoric skeleton set to be a main feature at an upcoming exhibit at the famed National Museum of Kenya.

Kenyan evangelical leaders are condemning the display, saying that it promotes the idea that evolution is real and corrupts children that will visit the exhibit.

“I did not evolve from Turkana Boy or anything like it,” says Bishop Boniface Adoyo, head of the nine million-membered Evangelical Alliance of Kenya, according to The Associated Press. “These sorts of silly views are killing our faith.”

U.S. Christian think-tank, The Discovery Institute, which some consider the hub for the intelligent design movement, has also been known for challenging Darwin’s teaching. It has described Evolution Sunday as “the height of hypocrisy.”

A statement on the group’s website read:

“Darwinists are hypocrites for claiming – falsely – that opposite to Darwinism is merely faith-based, and then turning around and trying to make the case the Darwinism itself is faith-based,” wrote Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman.

A survey by the Pew Form on Religion & Public Life in 2005 found that nearly half, 48%, of Americans believe life evolved over time, but of those, 18% think that evolution was guided by a Supreme Being. The survey also found that 42% believe life has always existed in its present form, in other words, no evolution occurred.

“It is not un-Christian at all to believe God may have used evolution to develop all of creation,” said the Rev. Ronald Wenzinger, according to Press & Sun-Bulletin.

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Human Evolution Exhibit to Butt Heads with Creation Museum (Christian Post, 070212)

NEW YORK – The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York, one of the world’s most recognized science centers, will unveil its new human evolution exhibit this coming Saturday.

Through fossil evidence as well as DNA and genomic research, the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins focuses on showing the evolution of mankind.

“I think this is the first major exhibition in the world where the fossil evidence and the genomic science are brought together to tell a mutually reinforcing story,” museum President Ellen Futter said Tuesday at a media preview. “Bringing the two stories together is extraordinarily powerful.”

The new wing, whose concept many Christians disagree with, will soon be competing with another upcoming museum that will attempt to defend creation also by examining fossils, animals, stars and natural science. The Creation Museum, which will open Memorial Day 2007, is being built outside Cincinnati by Answers in Genesis (AiG) - an apologetics ministry that focuses particularly on providing answers to questions surrounding the book of Genesis.

As visitors enter the AMNH exhibit in New York, they will find three skeletons – a chimpanzee, a Neanderthal and a modern human. At another display, one can learn about genomics concepts which illustrate how close our DNA is to that of other primates such as bonobos and chimpanzees. Through this, the scientists emphasize how humans originated from apes.

“I think what we’ve done here is we brought them (fossil and genomic analysis) together quite nicely,” commented Rob DeSalle, co-curator of the AMNH exhibit, to the Associated Press. “The stories can each tell us certain things. ... When they overlap, it’s kind of amazing they agree quite well.”

The layout of the exhibit may cause a stir among some creationists.

The findings presented should not shake up the creation museum organizers, however. Much like evolutionists, the creationists study the same fossil and DNA evidence that the AMNH will present. They argue that, if studied subjectively, the evidence will only back up scriptural authority.

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Should Christians Surrender the Origins Issue? (Mohler, 070214)

Tom Krattenmaker of USA Today argues that Christians are fighting a losing battle when it comes to defending a biblical worldview in terms of creation. His solution:

A suggestion to creationists: Let science be science, and let religion prevail in the vast areas where science has little or nothing to offer. It’s not as though science has an answer for everything of consequence. The purpose and meaning of life, the existence of good and evil and love and hate, the nature of a human soul and what becomes of it at death, the existence and will of the divine — these are questions that belong to ethics, philosophy and, of course, religion.

The “let science be science” and “let religion prevail” elsewhere argument assumes that the question of origins is of scientific, rather than theological importance. This is an unsustainable argument, of course, since every worldview must offer a account of origins and the meaning of the cosmos.

Krattenmaker suggests, in effect, that those who would defend a biblical framework for dating the earth are dragging Christianity into an unnecessary and avoidable credibility crisis. In his words:

No amount of scientific evidence will convince an ardent creationist of the validity of human evolution or that the Earth is billions of years old.

Nevertheless, the question frames a problem with the stance of the anti-science creationists that threatens not only their version of the world’s origins, but also the credibility of their religion itself. Because by attempting to marshal empirical evidence in support of their beliefs, they enter the debate on the scientists’ terms — terms that cannot possibly work in favor of a literal reading of the Bible. By playing in this arena, haven’t the creationists already lost the argument?

His argument sounds like that offered by the late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University, one of evolution’s most ardent champions. Gould, known for his own theory of “punctuated equilibrium” in evolutionary development, argued that science and Christianity represented “non-overlapping magisteria” or NOMA. By this, Gould meant that science and religion are not actually dealing in any way with the same objects of knowledge, so there can be no conflict. He described NOMA as “a blessedly simple and entirely conventional resolution” to the battle between evolutionary science and Christian belief.

The problem with NOMA is that is stands on an entirely false premise. Science and Christianity do deal with the same objects of knowledge and areas of interest. Every worldview offers some account of origins and some argument concerning the meaning of life. Christianity offers such an account and argument based on the Bible. Modern naturalistic science also offers such an account and argument, and this account necessarily entails a very different understanding of the meaning of life and the purpose of the cosmos. The problem with NOMA is that modern science and Christianity overlap in concerns all the time.

Sorry Mr. Krattenmaker, we can’t accept your call to “let science be science” and thus leave the question of the origin and meaning of the cosmos to those with naturalistic commitments. The Bible begins with an account of creation for a very important reason — everything flows from that account. Take that away, either by outright denial or by subtle accommodationism, and the entire biblical witness is undermined.

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Intelligent Design Advocates: Are Darwinists Afraid to Debate Us? (Christian Post, 070412)

Two of the nation’s main intelligent design (ID) advocates wrote an opinion editorial for the Tuesday edition of the Dallas Morning News questioning why pro-evolution professors at Southern Methodist University (SMU) did not accept their challenge to a debate.

Bruce Chapman, president of the Discovery Institute, and John West, associate director of the institute’s Center for Science & Culture (CSC), have publicly called out to the SMU faculty, and have accused them of being hypocritical.

“Various science professors at SMU have called on their university to ban our conference, and more recently some of them have declared that they ‘have a duty as practitioners of science to speak out’ against intelligent design,” read the article in the Dallas Morning News. “But if they truly believe that they have a duty to ‘speak out,’ why not speak out by engaging intelligent design scholars in a serious discussion?”

The discussion would have been a part of the upcoming “Darwin vs. Design” conference to take place this Friday and Saturday that will be held on the college’s campus. The debate idea was in response to the negative reaction the conference had received from the SMU faculty.

The president of the Discovery Institute had sent letters to three department chairs at SMU asking them to have a dialogue, where both sides would provide evidence for and against ID - a theory which argues that complex living organisms are the result of a “designer.”

SMU Anthropology Chair Robert V. Kemper last week declined the invitation, explaining that his department had previous engagements that it had to attend to.

Since the other two professors have still not responded, Chapman and West wrote to the local paper to express their disappointment. They feel that ID scientists are not given the same kind of respect that evolutionists are.

“Nowhere is the free exchange of ideas supposed to be more robust or uninhibited than on college campuses,” noted the article titled “Bruce Chapman and John West: Are the Darwinists afraid to debate us?”

“Unfortunately, this behavior [by evolutionists] is all too common among defenders of Darwinian theory,” the two added. “They publicly disparage intelligent design (often showing through their comments that they know very little about what it actually proposes), but they refuse to engage in genuine dialogue.”

The article also explained that the refusal to have scientific debate and discussion is contrary to Darwin himself, who felt that “a fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.”

“What are today’s Darwinists so afraid of?” concluded the editorial.

The “Darwin vs. Design” conference will feature three of ID’s most outspoken scientists, including Dr. Michael Behe, biochemist from Lehigh University and CSC senior fellow; Dr. Stephen Meyer, director of the CSC; and Dr. Jay Richards, a research fellow at the Acton Institute and CSC senior fellow.

Discovery Institute, a nonpartisan public policy think tank based in Seattle, is a major promoter of ID theory.

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Pope Says Evolution Can’t Be Proven (Christian Post, 070413)

BERLIN (AP) - Benedict XVI, in his first extended reflections on evolution published as pope, says that Darwin’s theory cannot be finally proven and that science has unnecessarily narrowed humanity’s view of creation.

In a new book, “Creation and Evolution,” published Wednesday in German, the pope praised progress gained by science, but cautioned that evolution raises philosophical questions science alone cannot answer.

“The question is not to either make a decision for a creationism that fundamentally excludes science, or for an evolutionary theory that covers over its own gaps and does not want to see the questions that reach beyond the methodological possibilities of natural science,” the pope said.

He stopped short of endorsing intelligent design, but said scientific and philosophical reason must work together in a way that does not exclude faith.

“I find it important to underline that the theory of evolution implies questions that must be assigned to philosophy and which themselves lead beyond the realms of science,” the pope was quoted as saying in the book, which records a meeting with fellow theologians the pope has known for years.

In the book, Benedict reflected on a 1996 comment of his predecessor, John Paul II, who said that Charles Darwin’s theories on evolution were sound, as long as they took into account that creation was the work of God, and that Darwin’s theory of evolution was “more than a hypothesis.”

“The pope (John Paul) had his reasons for saying this,” Benedict said. “But it is also true that the theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory.”

Benedict added that the immense time span that evolution covers made it impossible to conduct experiments in a controlled environment to finally verify or disprove the theory.

“We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory,” he said.

Evolution has come under fire in recent years by proponents — mostly conservative Protestants — of “intelligent design,” who believe that living organisms are so complex they must have been created by a higher force rather than evolving from more primitive forms.

The book, which was released by the Sankt Ulrich publishing house, includes reflections of the pope and others who attended a meeting of theological scholars at the papal summer estate in Castel Gandolfo in early September.

The pope’s remarks were consistent with one of his most important themes, that faith and reason are interdependent.

“Science has opened up large dimensions of reason ... and thus brought us new insights,” the pope wrote. “But in the joy at the extent of its discoveries, it tends to take away from us dimensions of reason that we still need.

“Its results lead to questions that go beyond its methodical canon and cannot be answered within it,” he said.

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Oregon Biology Teacher Fired Over Bible References (Foxnews, 070320)

SISTERS, Ore. — During his eight days as a part-time high school biology teacher, Kris Helphinstine included Biblical references in material he provided to students and gave a PowerPoint presentation that made links between evolution, Nazi Germany and Planned Parenthood.

That was enough for the Sisters School Board, which fired the teacher Monday night for deviating from the curriculum on the theory of evolution.

“I think his performance was not just a little bit over the line,” board member Jeff Smith said. “It was a severe contradiction of what we trust teachers to do in our classrooms.”

Helphinstine, 27, said in a phone interview with The Bulletin newspaper of Bend that he included the supplemental material to teach students about bias in sources, and his only agenda was to teach critical thinking.

“Critical thinking is vital to scientific inquiry,” said Helphinstine, who has a master’s degree in science from Oregon State. “My whole purpose was to give accurate information and to get them thinking.”

Helphinstine said he did not teach the idea that God created the world. “I never taught creationism,” he said. “I know what it is, and I went out of my way not to teach it.”

Parent John Rahm told the newspaper that he became concerned when his freshman daughter said she was confused by the supplemental material provided by Helphinstine.

“He took passages that had all kinds of Biblical references,” Rahm said. “It prevented her from learning what she needed to learn.”

Board members met with Helphinstine privately for about 90 minutes before the meeting. The teacher did not stay for the public portion.

“How many minds did he pollute?” Dan Harrison, the father of a student in Helphinstine’s class, said at the meeting. “It’s a thinly veiled attempt to hide his own agenda.”

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Southern Methodist Professors Protest ‘Darwin vs. Design’ Event: Intelligent design conference upsets professors (Christian Post, 070329)

[KH: Again! Liberals and atheists try to restrict free speech when they feel like to.]

DALLAS (AP) — Science professors at Southern Methodist University have written letters of protest to school officials to complain about a coming conference about intelligent design.

Members of the school’s anthropology department demanded the school shut down the “Darwin vs. Design” conference, co-sponsored by the SMU law school’s Christian Legal Society. The conference will argue that a higher power is the best explanation for aspects of life and the universe.

“These are conferences of and for believers and their sympathetic recruits,” a letter from the anthropology department said. “They have no place on an academic campus with their polemics hidden behind a deceptive mask.”

The biology and geology departments sent similar letters.

The university does not endorse the event but won’t cancel it, interim provost Tom Tunks said last Friday.

“Although SMU makes its facilities available as a community service, and in support of the free marketplace of ideas, providing facilities for those programs does not imply SMU’s endorsement of the presenters’ views,” a statement from the school said.

SMU professors say the “Darwin vs. Design” conference could send a message that scientists at the school support intelligent design as an explanation for how life forms evolved.

“This is propaganda,” said John Ubelaker, former chairman of the chemistry department. “Using the campus for propaganda does not fit into anybody’s scheme of intellectual discussion.”

Conference organizers say the faculty’s concerns are groundless and predictable.

“We aren’t trying to be sneaky,” said Stephen Meyer, who is scheduled to speak at the event.

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Protests Planned for Grand Opening of Creation Museum (Christian Post, 070427)

A nearly-completed $27 million museum that will showcase the literal biblical account of creation has been drawing enough criticism to spur several opponents into slating protests against the museum on the day of its opening.

Set to open on Memorial Day, the Creation Museum, built just outside Cincinnati, is trying to give an alternative to evolutionary models of science. Challengers are calling the museum “fantasy,” however, and have expressed fear that their children may be influenced by what the museum teaches.

“Many educated humans realize this is a myth,” said Edwin Kagin, a Union attorney and the national legal director of American Atheists, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. “Myths aren’t necessarily untrue, but they aren’t literal, either.”

The protestors, who are made up of non-Christians as well as Christians who do not favor literal interpretations of Genesis, have dubbed themselves Rally for Reason, and they feel that the new exhibit will create an unhealthy environment for children. The belief that evolution never existed and that the earth was made in six 24-hour days is not something that should be taught to children.

According to the group organizers, hundreds are expected to protest.

“My brothers and sisters in the faith who embrace [the creationist] understanding call into question the whole Christian concept,” expressed the Rev. Mendle Adams, pastor of St. Peter’s United Church of Christ in Cincinnati, according to the Enquirer. “They make us a laughingstock.”

Contrary to the protesters, many groups have continued to show support for the new Creation Museum, which was created by Answers in Genesis (AiG) – an apologetics ministry that focuses particularly on providing answers to questions surrounding the book of Genesis.

“I think people will enjoy . . . being able to see a different side from what some scientific findings have shown,” said the Rev. Bill Henard, senior pastor of Lexington’s Porter Memorial Baptist Church, according to the Philadelphia Enquirer. He has even noted that his Sunday School classes will probably visit the display.

From a recent Gallup Poll that was done in March, it seems that many agree with at least part of the museum. 47% of the polled Americans responded that God created humans similar to their current form within the last 10,000 years.

The museum has been having a positive impact for its workers as well. One of the carpenters who has been doing work for the preparation, Jeremy Huff, even admitted to being “saved” while on the job.

“[B]eing around everybody, I’ve started to get closer to the Lord,” explained Huff in the Courier-Journal. “I guess I was always on my way. I used to go to church, but I got away from it. And I wanted to accept the Lord into my heart, but I didn’t really have anyone to help me. Now I think God put me here for a reason, and I’m working for God.”

He added, “I didn’t know enough before I came here. I realized I needed more, and I’ve learned a lot. And I think a lot of other people are going to learn too.”

Mark Looy, vice president of outreach for AiG, has said that he will accommodate all protesters, and that they have a right to be outside, as long as they do not break any laws. He also said that families need not worry about opening day in that it will be secure. He has already hired a security staff to man the museum.

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‘Design’ Proponents Accuse Wikipedia of Bias, Hypocrisy (Christian Post, 070509)

Discovery Institute, an organization that promotes the field of intelligent design (ID), has posted a series of comments on its website accusing Wikipedia moderators of being unfairly biased against their view.

The author of the criticisms, Casey Luskin, a California attorney and co-founder of the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) Center, expressed his frustration with the sources cited from Wikipedia’s database as well as the group in charge of the online encyclopedia project for pushing their own agenda against ID theory.

“So what’s the purpose of the ‘encyclopedia’ page?” questioned Luskin in an earlier posting. “Is it intended to inform people about what intelligent design actually says or simply to publicize to the world what some critics want it to be, and what they think is wrong with it? It appears the primary aim is the latter.”

One of the disputes that is currently going on involves a ban of one of the pro-ID contributors from the web database. Wikipedia moderators will not allow the user’s contributions, because they claims that the ID proponent offer disruptive POV (point of view) statements and has made subjective submissions about what ID is.

Specifically, moderators did not accept the submission that intelligent design is a “theory.” Instead, they said, it should be treated only as a belief that the world was created by some sort of designer, and that the hypothesis does not stand up to scientific models that would allow it to be called a “theory.”

“You obviously have no understanding of what a scientific theory is,” read a moderator response on the Wikipedia site. “Please read Wikipedia’s article on this subject, ‘Theory.’ Something can be a scientific theory and also a fact. Please do not make any more such contentious edits on subjects you have an incomplete understanding of.”

Luskin is now accusing the people behind the internet encyclopedia of hypocrisy, however, and noted that they are not “the blameless, objective scholars they claim to be.”

“Promoting a ‘point of view’?” continued the IDEA Center co-founder. “Their hypocrisy is incredible! The editor is clearly banning people because they disagree with his ‘point of view.’ It seems clear that only certain ‘points of view’ are acceptable on Wikipedia when it comes to intelligent design.”

In his most recent post, Luskin looks specifically at a misrepresentation put out on Wikipedia that skews what the “real data” looks like.

According to Wikipedia, in a 2005 Harris poll, ten% of adults in the United States view human beings as “so complex that they required a powerful force or intelligent being to help create them.” The site then mentions that the Discovery Institute has more favorable polls, but that they are unreliable because they have expressed interest in the outcome of the results.

“This post looks at merely two sentences out of the long Wikipedia entry on intelligent design,” expressed Luskin, “and finds inaccuracy, misrepresentation, bias, and hypocrisy.”

The first problem he cited is that the poll had two responses that both favored ID thought, but only one was used for the 10% result. The “actual results” would show that around 74% of Americans believe there is a creator.

Secondly, Luskin noted that the poll the site used was misrepresented in that it had actually been used to show favor for teaching ID in schools, which reveals inconsistency in its usage. The contributor also only provided partial information from the poll, which had several other statistics in favor of ID.

As a final note, Luskin directed attention to a reference in the article to Paul Kurtz, a leading atheist activist and co-founder for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

“The Wikipedia authors are so biased against intelligent design, they’re willing to cite a heavily biased source in order to allege a bias on the part of ID-proponents,” concluded the California lawyer. “Chances are, they didn’t even notice the logical hypocrisy in what they did.”

According to its own definition on the site, Wikipedia does mention that critics see the web-based encyclopedia as being possibly unreliable and inaccurate. It also mentions that, for the most part, it is roughly as accurate as other encyclopedias.

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School Accused of Denying Professor Tenure Over Intelligent Design Beliefs (Christian Post, 070515)

A collaboration of Intelligent Design (ID)supporters has accused Iowa State University (ISU) of denying tenure to one of its professors despite his surpassing of benchmark requirements that would “ordinarily” demonstrate “excellence sufficient to lead to a national or international reputation.”

The Discovery Institute has voiced frustration over the refusal because it believes the school rejected the application of Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez, author of The Privileged Planet, due to his promotion of ID thought. The organization is accusing ISU of being biased and extremist against ID “theory.”

“The denial of tenure to Dr. Gonzalez is a blatant violation of both academic freedom and free speech,” said Dr. John G. West, associate director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, in a statement. “The denial of tenure is all the more incredible given the fact that Dr. Gonzalez exceeds by 350% the number of peer-reviewed journal publications required by his department to meet its standard of excellence in research.”

Last week, Gonzalez filed an appeal with ISU President Greg Geoffroy, and is still awaiting a response. The president has 20 days to respond, and has refused to comment on the reason why his tenure was denied.

“Since an appeal is on my desk that I will have to pass judgment on, it is not appropriate for me to offer any comment,” explained Geoffroy to the Ames Tribune.

ISU is one of many schools that have previously drafted statements against the use of ID in science. In 2005, one of Gonzalez’s colleagues, Hector Avalos, had even expressed his concern with the ID professor teaching at ISU because the college had started to get the reputation as being an “intelligent design school,” according to the Ames Tribune.

The Discovery Institute is strongly disagreeing with the school’s outlook on Gonzalez, however. It has noted that his advocacy of ID has been done outside his work as a professor, and that he does not teach ID in class.

The organization says that it is not fair that he is targeted for his beliefs while overlooking his credentials.

“The basic freedom of scientists, teachers, and students to do scientific research and question the Darwinian hegemony is coming under attack by people that can only be called Darwinian fundamentalists,” added West. “Intelligent design scientists are losing their jobs, and their professional careers are being torpedoed by these extremists.”

Currently, the department of astronomy and physics that Gonzalez works for requires “excellence sufficient to lead to a national or international reputation.” according to the department’s guidelines. This excellence, the guidelines add, “would ordinarily be shown by the publication of approximately fifteen papers of good quality in refereed journals.”

Gonzalez has already written 68 peer-reviewed journals, and 25 of those have been written while teaching at OSU, where he has been since 2001.

“I was surprised to hear that my tenure was denied at any level, but I was disappointed that the president at the end denied me,” explained Gonzales, who is also a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, to the Ames Tribune. “I believe that I fully met the requirements for tenure.”

Other achievements for the ID proponent include authorizing a college-level astronomy textbook published by Cambridge University, helping in the discovery of two new planets, and building technology that helped discover extrasolar planets.

Gonzales was one of three faculty members that were denied tenure or promotion by ISU out of the 66 total professors that applied.

Generally, those individuals that are denied tenure leave the university.

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Anti-Evolution Billboards ‘Evolve’ Man into Monkey (Christian Post, 070518)

“Are they making a monkey out of you?”

This is the question being asked by a Minn.-based Christian organization that just launched a billboard campaign attempting to point to holes in evolutionary thought.

The non-profit group, Who Is Your Creator, is running advertisements that show four panels depicting a man “evolving” into a “monkey” (actually an ape). The organization hopes the billboards will draw in visitors to their website to learn more information about the issue.

“It’s kind of funny because the theory of evolution is based on chance mutations and natural selection,” explained Julie Haberle, founder of the Who Is Your Creator, in Cybercast News Service. “[Thus] the process can go either way.”

Alongside the billboards, the group also launched a “Let’s See How Evolution Works” game in its forums on Monday. The game explores and critiques the hypothetical stages of specific evolutionary transitions, which is commonly used as proof for evolution.

“If evolution is true, it still must be occurring around us as random mutations would continue to occur,” quoted the first posting in the forum. “So, aside from simple speciation, where are all the living transitional forms that are evolving into other forms?”

As a major point to the campaign, the organizers hope to start discussion about evolutionary theory, and how it is not completely justifiable. The founders are worried that children who learn about evolution in school are only taught that it is undeniable fact. But Who Is Your Creator employees disagree.

As a main goal, they would like to see other subjects, such as creation, taught alongside evolution and for students to see more than one side of the argument. Organizers have also realized teaching creation is largely improbable at the time, however, but would at least like schools to teach about the flaws inside evolution.

“Evolution needs to be assessed by empirical scientific standards,” said Haberle in a statement, “not by the current philosophical standards based on ‘naturalism.’”

Currently, the billboards are being displayed in six locations in Oregon and Georgia through space donated by Revelation Outdoor Management. More billboards are expected to move into “controversial legislative states” such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri after fundraising.

A retired attorney has also donated a $5,000 prize for a contest that Who Is Your Creator is running. Applicants will submit a four-part legal opinion that will present the scientific and legal repercussions of teaching evolution and creation within the public school system.

Evolution scientists, however, have commented that the scientific community has more than enough supported the position of evolution. They note that the campaign is negatively disturbing a theory that has helped mankind and have labeled the Who Is Your Creator organization as a threat. The American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) has even put the group on their list of “Threats to Evolution Education” in Minnesota.

“Indeed, scientists, students, educators and policymakers recently gathered in Washington, D.C., to hear leading doctors and researchers explain how their studies of evolution have led to critical advancements in medicine and the development of treatments for diseases like cancer,” said Dr. Holly Menninger of the AIBS Public Policy Office to Cybercast News Service.

According to an August 2005 Pew Research Center survey, Americans believe in creation over evolution by a 60% to 26% margin and “nearly two-thirds of Americans say that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public schools.”

“How silly that they would think we are a threat unless they don’t what the public to know the truth,” concluded Haberle in his statement.

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Anti-Evolutionist Runs Unopposed for Education Board Presidency (Christian Post, 070522)

An avid anti-evolutionist is currently running unopposed in an election for the position of president-elect for the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE), alarming educators around the nation.

Kansas native Kenneth Willard will gain the position on the board – which serves “to strengthen state leadership in educational policymaking” – this July when the elections begin for selecting officers.

Several evolutionist proponents are now scrambling to try to fight his election, though it may be impossible.

“We are in a nationwide struggle for the integrity of science education,” explained Kenneth Miller, a biology professor at Brown University, in the New York Times, “and any situation that provides an opportunity for the opponents of science education to advance their agenda is a matter of concern.”

Willard has now seemed to solidify his run for the president elect since his opponent dropped out of the race over personal reasons after the nomination period ended. The Kansas Republican cannot be challenged now.

Opponents against him hope that they can write in votes during the July election, but there is no provision in the NASBE policy to allow that.

One of the possible write-in candidates would be Sam Schloemer of Ohio, who was given a position on the board last November with the aid of current members who campaigned against creationist candidates. Supporters would vote for him and hope the tallies would count.

Although he originally expressed little interest in the position, Scholemer said in the New York Times, “I would rather serve than see someone of his persuasion represent school boards across the country.”

The controversy is a small part of the ongoing disputes between evolutionists and anti-evolutionists. Several scientists and educators have tried to encourage school districts around the nation to show the problems with evolution rather than only teaching it as absolute truth.

A similar conflict is currently ongoing with the opening of the $27 million Creation Museum, which supports the literal six-day account of creation, this Memorial Day. Opponents to the museum are worried that their children will be swayed by what it has to say while museum organizers are arguing that youth are not receiving a balanced view on how the world began.

Amid efforts opposing Willard’s run for presidency, several board members have shown support for the anti-evolutionist. They feel that his challenges to evolution thought are constructive for public education, even if they do not necessarily agree with his model.

The president-elect nominee was part of a 2005 committee that voted to include intelligent design – a hypothesis that life is a result of an ultimate “designer” – within its policies. The policy was later reversed.

Should Willard gain the president elect position, he will take office in January 2009.

Each state within the board is allowed one vote in the election.

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Poll: Most Republicans Doubt Evolution (Christian Post, 070612)

A majority of Republicans do not believe in evolution, according to a Gallup Poll released Monday.

From the poll taken between May 21-24, results showed that 68% of Republicans tended to favor the idea that humans were created in their present form about 10,000 years ago, while only 30% believe in the theory that humans originated from simple organisms. Independents and Democrats, on the other hand, were more likely to believe in evolution - 61 and 57%, respectively.

The results come after recent presidential primary debates touched on the subject of evolution and whether Republican candidates believed in the theory.

On May 3, at a GOP debate in California, three candidates – Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee, and Tom Tancredo – raised their hand to show they do not believe in evolution when asked. And last Tuesday, two of the three expounded on their stance on evolution and how that fits into their belief in a higher being.

“In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth. A person either believes that God created the process or believes that it was an accident and that it just happened all on its own,” explained Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and an ordained Baptist minister, at the Republican debate last Tuesday. “If anybody wants to believe that they are the descendants of a primate, they are certainly welcome to do it.”

“I believe we are created in the image of God for a particular purpose, and I believe that with all my heart,” explained Brownback, the senator from Kansas. “I am fully convinced there’s a God of the universe that loves us very much and was involved in the process. How He did it, I don’t know.”

Based on the results of past surveys, the latest findings were expected. In a poll taken from May 21-24, responses suggested that those that attend church are more likely to not believe in evolution; About 74% of individuals who attend service weekly had said they do not believe the theory while 71% of people who seldom or never attend church said they trust Darwinian thought.

Past polls have also shown that a higher proportion of Republicans attend church than Democrats, leading to the described conclusions.

Beyond Republicans, other recent Gallup Polls have reported that most Americans in general tend to believe that God created the world.

In a June 1-3 poll, 66% of U.S. citizens said they believe in creationism (39% “definitely true” and 27% “probably true”) while only 53% of Americans say they believe in evolution (18% “definitely true” and 35% “probably true.”).

Among those who believe in evolution, however, most people still believe that God was behind the process.

A poll taken from May 10-13 revealed that 43% of the population believes in strict creationism, 38% believes in evolution but that God guided it, and only 14% believes that man developed without a higher being as part of the process.

Overall, 81% of Americans surveyed think that there was a creator to everything.

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Creation Museum Stimulates Christian Discussion of Origins (Christian Post, 070527)

The $27 million Creation Museum opens its doors on Memorial Day amid a flood of protests and debates over its version of history based on the literal interpretation of the Bible.

The 60,000-square-foot high-tech facility, located just outside of Cincinnati, depicts a literal six-day creation model of the earth, beginning about 6,000 years ago, and stands as one of the several Christian models on how the world and life first began. It has also revived the debate among New Earth creationists, Old Earth creationists, anti-creationism evolutionists, and theistic evolutionists.

“The argument we make is this: When you believe in millions of years of evolution and add it to the Bible, you actually have to change what the Bible clearly says,” explained Ken Ham, the founder of the museum and CEO of the apologetics ministry Answers in Genesis, in an interview last week with The Christian Post. “You have to reinterpret it. That unlocks the door to say that you don’t take this as written. You reinterpret it from outside influences, which means that you tell the next generation that you can’t take the Bible as written. So you just undermine biblical authority.”

While many Christians would agree with Ham, particularly New Earth creationists who believe that the Hebrew text of Genesis can only mean a literal six (24-hour) day account of creation, there are also many who believe the Bible must not be looked at literally in all instances.

Dr. Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institute of Health, says he has no problem with looking at Genesis as being more of an allegory for how the world was created.

“As a born-again Christian, I regard Ken Ham as my brother in faith and I have no doubt of the complete sincerity of his position,” Collins told The Christian Post. “But as a working scientist who has studied the intricacies of human DNA as my life’s profession, I have arrived at very different conclusions on the basis of the facts in front of me.”

Collins, who is a theistic evolutionist [KH:??], is recognized for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and successfully leading the effort to complete the Human Genome Project (HGP), a complex multidisciplinary scientific enterprise directed at mapping and sequencing all of the human DNA, and determining aspects of its function. He is the author of the book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief and is invited to many settings to defend Christianity in debates about the existence of God and evolution.

“By closing their minds to the profoundly compelling evidence about the age of the universe and the relatedness of living things by descent from a common ancestor, those who adopt an ultra-literal interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 seem to imply that God needs to be defended against what science is teaching us about nature,” said Collins. “Didn’t God create all of this? Isn’t science therefore a way to worship Him?”

As a theistic evolutionist, Collins believes that the world was created billions of years ago, and that evolution does take place, just that evolution is guided by God.

“Could God actually be threatened by what our puny minds are learning about the beautiful complexity of His creation?” posed the scientist. “And was Genesis intended as a textbook of science, a source for Creation Science museum exhibits, or a powerful message to tell us about God’s character and our own?”

More widely held by Christians than New Earth creationism is Old Earth creationism, which is typically more compatible with mainstream scientific thought on the issues of geology, cosmology and the age of the Earth. The latter variant of the creationist view still generally takes the accounts of creation in Genesis more literally than theistic evolution (or evolutionary creationism), but argues that the earth is much older than a few thousand years. Old Earth creationism is also divided among Gap creationists, Progressive creationists, and Day-Age creationists.

Reasons to Believe (RTB) – a science and faith think tank which believes that the world was created in “ages” that correlate to Genesis’ six “days” – has taken the middle ground, believing in a billion-year-old earth while at the same time dispelling evolution.

The focus of its scientists when discussing the new Creation Museum is to look at the commonalities that Christians share and not get too caught up in the Genesis argument. Christians should not break fellowship over that issue, they say.

“One might expect mutual hostility between Answers in Genesis (the ministry behind the Creation Museum) and RTB since we fall into two different and disparate creationist camps,” explained RTB president Hugh Ross and group of scientists in a statement to The Christian Post. “However, from a Christian perspective, we have more in common than we have areas of disagreement. This statement does not gloss over the significant differences between each view or minimize the importance of working through those differences. It simply highlights the ‘in-house’ nature of this creation debate that God calls us to resolve in a manner that honors Him.”

A question that arises amid all of the debates is whether or not one type of creation model will discourage a person’s faith. If someone was told that evolution was true, for instance, would it drive them away from the Bible?

“Maybe there’s someone out there – but I haven’t met anybody yet – who because we told them to believe the six literal days and believe what the Bible has written, has left Christianity,” argued Ham. “But I sure have met many, many people, even just in the conference I was at in Washington, D.C., because of what they were taught years ago about evolution, that they learned not to trust the Bible.”

Collins, however, says he has seen the opposite occur. He has seen many youth leave the church, because they were told that the literal creationist model was the only one that they could follow.

“They have been led to believe that acceptance of those facts (for evolution) would mean the collapse of their faith,” Collins explained to The Christian Post. “They feel they are being asked to choose between science and faith. And yes, to my great sadness, quite a few of them choose science and walk away from their faith. How terribly tragic, and how terribly unnecessary.”

Despite their disagreements, all three camps of belief came to agreement when it came to this point: that what truly saves is the grace of God and belief in Jesus Christ. Through that, humans gain life.

To emphasize this conclusion, Collins shared a statement from one of the most important figures in the development of Western Christianity, St. Augustine.

“In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received,” wrote the fifth-century Christian theologian. “In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.”

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The Latest Problems With The “Man Evolved From Apes” Thesis (Townhall.Com, 070903)

By Frank Pastore

Cavemen are popular once again.

No, I’m not talking about those successful Geico commercials that won their own series on ABC starting October 2, (view the trailer here).

I’m talking about the two discoveries that came out in August that should force all those “man evolved from apes” evolution charts in schoolbooks to be redrawn. You know the ones. You’ve got the knuckle-dragging, club-wielding ape on the left hand side and a businessman carrying a briefcase on the right hand side, with all the hypothetical evolutionary links filled in between (as in this one).

What’s been discovered is a 10.5 million year old gorilla and that two of our “ape men” ancestors actually lived together.

Let me explain.

See, the problem is—these two discoveries render all previous human evolution charts wrong.

But, the bigger problem is—unless you’re a scientist—you’ve likely never have heard about it outside of this column or at least until you’d see the trailer for Ben Stein’s movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” coming out in February 2008.

As Stein exposes, there’s been a virtual Inquisition by Darwinian fundamentalists against anyone who dares challenge The Book—Darwin’s infamous 1859 “Origin of the Species.” No longer about following the bread crumbs of inquiry in pursuit of truth, Big Science is now all about enforcing doctrinaire dogmatism.

Dare question the problems with naturalistic evolution—as I do here—and be guilty of blasphemy.

Ask for explanations about the still missing “missing links,” the absence of transitional forms, the sudden Cambrian Explosion, or the gaping gaps in the fossil record, and be branded an unbeliever—one who must repent of their sins, recant and do penance or be damned to academic hell for all time.

As I learned long ago, if you can believe the first sentence of the Bible, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth,” you won’t have much trouble with the rest of the 66 books.

Make no mistake. Fundamentalists are those who censure skeptics and prohibit inquiry. Today’s fundamentalists are not the Christians who, like me, are eager to examine the scientific evidence for Darwinian evolution, but those who deny that opportunity from ever happening.

The real fundamentalists are those who chair the various science departments at our major universities—those unwilling to allow dissent.

Nonetheless, they’re losing. Their program to indoctrinate students into scientism is failing. According to a recent USA Today/Gallup Poll (here), 66% of Americans believe man is the product of creation, not evolution.

“Evolution” is a term that can be so broad so as to mean simply “change through time,” which no one disputes. Or, it can be so narrowly construed so as to mean “all life originated from a single living cell,” and “man evolved from apes,” which Americans reject by a margin of two to one.

No. We are no closer today proving those last two theses than we were in Darwin’s day, a century and a half ago. In fact, we’re actually farther away.

So, what were these two important recent discoveries?

First, as reported here on August 9, two alleged ancestors of man, Homo Erectus and Homo Habilis, were found to be living together about 1.5 million years ago (MYA). This is a big deal because Erectus was supposed to have evolved from Habilis before later evolving into Sapiens (us).

Think of it as finding out dad and grandpa were actually brothers, not father and son.

This chart on Early Human Phylogeny at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, will have to be revised—again. The mythical evolutionary tree of life with man’s ascent from ape is looking more like a patch of thousands of blades of grass with the passing of each generation. Sapiens ends up all by himself—an evolutionary orphan—almost as though he just appeared in the fossil record fully formed—as though he were created and placed here. Imagine that.

The second discovery, reported here, pushed the hypothetical human-ape split back another 10 million years, to now around 20 MYA. How so? The traditional theory is that man evolved from chimps about 6 MYA, chimps evolved from gorillas about 8 MYA, and gorillas evolved from orangutans about 14 MYA. But, with the discovery of a 10.5 million year old gorilla in Africa, this pushes the human-ape split back to at least 20 MYA.

But between 15-20 MYA, there were dozens of primate species in Africa, and the hominid trail goes completely cold after 7 MYA. It looks like a dead end—or to the true believer, at least a serious detour over uncharted territory.

Bottom line, not only do we find that dad and grandpa were brothers, but now we find out that we were adopted—or created.

As the authors of the report on all this in the British journal Nature noted, “We know nothing about how the human line actually emerged from apes.”

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The Origin of Species, and Everything Else: Coping with evolution and religion (National Review, 071008)

Jim Manzi

In the closing scene of the classic 1960 movie Inherit the Wind, Spencer Tracy holds a Bible in one hand and Darwin’s Origin of Species in the other, smiles, claps them together, and puts them both under his arm as he walks out of the courtroom. This was an iconic encapsulation of the broader consensus of educated Americans of that era that we can accept both God and Darwin. In recent decades, however, the conservative coalition has become divided over the compatibility of faith and evolution.

Many people, including many scientists, have traditionally reconciled God with evolution by considering evolution to be a process created by God. Lately, this common-sense position has been attacked as happy-talk by scientific atheists who condescendingly argue that anyone who really understands evolution realizes that it implies atheism. Probably the most famous of these is Oxford’s Richard Dawkins, Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, who has expounded this idea over more than 30 years in a series of bestselling books with increasingly direct titles from The Selfish Gene to The Blind Watchmaker to, most recently, The God Delusion.

Scientific atheists put forward two propositions as logically deducible from science: that evolution eliminates the need for a Creator, and that evolution has no ultimate goal or purpose. That known science implies either conclusion is a myth, both in the sense of being objectively false, and also in the sense of being a story that a community of believers tells itself in order to provide meaning and coherence to the lives of its members. Beneath a veneer of hyper-rationality, scientific atheists often see themselves in a deeply romantic light: as uniquely courageous in the face of unpleasant facts, and as bringers-of-fire to unenlightened humanity.

Not surprisingly, many philosophers and theologians have disputed the arguments raised by Dawkins and his allies. Most of this debate, unfortunately, engages with evolution only at a very abstract or metaphorical level, which lends itself to a lot of gassy talk. In order to evaluate the claims of each group, we need to consider the mechanics of evolution.

To understand these mechanics, it’s very helpful to look at an analogous system. So-called Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are computer-software implementations of the same kind of mathematics that takes place in the biological process of evolution. (Dawkins, in fact, devoted about 40 pages of The Blind Watchmaker to describing a primitive GA-type program that he wrote on his PC.) Today, GAs are widely deployed in artificial-intelligence computer programming to solve such prosaic engineering problems as optimally scheduling trucks on a delivery route or identifying the best combination of process-control settings to get maximum output from a factory.

EVOLUTION ON THE FACTORY FLOOR

Consider the example of a chemical plant with a control panel that has 100 on/off switches used to regulate the manufacturing process. You are given the task of finding the combination of switch settings that will generate the highest total output for the plant. How would you solve the problem? One obvious approach would be to run the plant briefly with each possible combination of switch settings and select the best one. Unfortunately, even in this very simplified example there are 2100 possible combinations. This is a surprisingly gigantic number — much larger, for instance, than the number of grains of sand on Earth. We could spend a million lifetimes trying various combinations of switches and never get to most of the possible combinations.

But there’s a trick that can help us. Once we start to try combinations, we might begin to notice patterns like “when switches 17 and 84 are set to ‘on,’ production always increases when I put switch 53 to the ‘off’ position.” Such insights could help us to narrow down our search, and get to the answer faster. This might not seem to be much help in the face of such an enormous number of possibilities, but the power of these rules is also surprising.

To illustrate this, think of a simple game: I pick a random whole number between one and a billion, and you try to guess it. If the only thing I tell you when you make each guess is whether you are right or wrong, you would have very little chance of guessing my number even if I let you guess non-stop for a year. If, however, I tell you whether each guess is high or low, there is a procedure that will get the exact answer within about 30 guesses. You should always guess 500 million first. For all subsequent guesses, you should always pick the mid-point of the remaining possibilities. If, for example, the response to your opening guess of 500 million is that you are too high, your next guess should be the mid-point of the remaining possibilities, or 250 million. If the response to this second guess is “too low,” then your next guess should be the mid-point of 250 million and 500 million, or 375 million, and so on. You can find my number within about a minute.

A Genetic Algorithm works on roughly the same principle. Let’s go back to our problem of the 2100 possible combinations of switch settings. We can use a Genetic Algorithm as an automated procedure to sort through the vast “search space” of possibilities — and thus home in quickly on the best one. This procedure has the same three elements as our procedure for guessing the number: a starting guess, a feedback measurement that gives some indication of how good any guess is, and an iterative method that exploits this feedback to improve subsequent guesses.

In order to establish the initial guess for the GA, imagine writing a vertical column of 100 zeroes and ones on a piece of paper. If we agree to let one=“turn the switch on” and zero=“turn the switch off,” this could be used as a set of instructions for operating the chemical plant. The first of the hundred would tell us whether switch 1 should be on or off, the second would tell us what to do with switch 2, and so on all the way down to the 100th switch.

This is a pretty obvious analogy to what happens with biological organisms and their genetic codes — and therefore, in a GA, we refer to this list as a “genome.”

Our goal, then, is to find the “genome” that will lead the plant to run at maximum output. The algorithm creates an initial bunch of guesses — genomes — by randomly generating, say, 1,000 strings of 100 zeros and ones. We then do 1,000 sequential production runs at the factory, by setting the switches in the plant to the combination of settings indicated by each genome and measuring the output of the plant for each; this measured output is termed the “fitness value.” (Typically, in fact, we construct a software-based simulation of the factory that allows us to run such tests more rapidly.) Next, the program selects the 500 of the 1,000 organisms that have the lowest fitness values and eliminates them. This is the feedback measurement in our algorithm — and it is directly analogous to the competition for survival of biological entities.

Next comes the algorithmic process for generating new guesses, which has two major components: crossover and mutation. These components are directly modeled on the biological process of reproduction. First, the 500 surviving organisms are randomly paired off into 250 pairs of mates. The GA then proceeds through these pairs of organisms one at a time. For each pair it flips a coin. If the coin comes up heads, then organism A “reproduces” with organism B by simply creating one additional copy of each; this is called direct replication. If it comes up tails, then organism A reproduces with organism B via “crossover”: The program selects a random “crossover point,” say at the 34th of the 100 positions, and then creates one offspring that has the string of zeroes and ones from organism A up to the crossover point and those from organism B after the crossover point, and an additional offspring that has the string of zeroes and ones from organism B up to the crossover point and those from organism A after the crossover point. The 500 resulting offspring are added to the population of 500 surviving parents to create a new population of 1,000 organisms. Finally, a soupçon of mutation is added by randomly flipping roughly every 10,000th digit from zero to one or vice versa.

The new generation is now complete. Fitness is evaluated for each, the bottom 500 are eliminated, and the surviving 500 reproduce through the same process of direct replication, crossover, and mutation to create the subsequent generation. This cycle is repeated over and over again through many generations. The average fitness value of the population moves upward through these iterations, and the algorithm, in fits and starts, closes in on the best solution.

THE DIVINE PROGRAM

This seems like a laborious process — but it works: It helps us get the factory to very high output much faster than we could otherwise. Computer scientists were inspired to do it this way because they observed the same three fundamental algorithmic operators — selection, crossover, and mutation — accomplish a similar task in the natural world. That such a comparatively simple concept can explain so much about the way nature works is what makes genetic evolution a scientific paradigm of stupendous beauty and power. As Leonardo famously put it, simplicity is the highest form of sophistication.

And if we look closely at how a Genetic Algorithm works in the factory, we can glean some important insights about how evolution works in nature — insights that have a direct bearing on the continuing controversy about God and evolution.

Notice, first of all, that our factory “evolution” process did not begin ex nihilo. It required pre-existing building blocks — both in the form of an initial population and in the underlying rules of the algorithm itself.

Notice, second, that one of the 2100 possible combinations of switch settings will produce the highest output, and with enough time the algorithm will always converge on this one answer. The algorithm is therefore the opposite of goalless: It is, rather, a device designed to tend toward a specific needle in a haystack — the single best potential result.

Notice, third and finally, that though the number of possible solutions is very large, it is finite. With sufficient computational power the goal is, in principle, knowable without ever running the algorithm. The algorithm itself is just a computational convenience.

These three observations will be very helpful to us as we evaluate the myths of scientific atheism.

First, it is obvious from the factory analogy that evolution does not eliminate the problem of ultimate origins — of what, in explicitly religious terms, is called Creation. Dawkins himself, in The Blind Watchmaker, is clear about the fact that evolution requires pre-existing building blocks. He writes: “The physicist’s problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist’s problem is the problem of complexity. The biologist tries to explain the workings, and the coming into existence, of complex things, in terms of simpler things. He can regard his task as done when he has arrived at entities so simple that they can safely be handed over to the physicists.”

Dawkins, then, has punted the problem to the physicists. Specifically, he cites The Creation, a book by Oxford physics professor Peter Atkins that addresses this question. Dawkins says that Atkins claims the original units of creation do not demand anything as grand as a Creator. But Atkins has come to have second thoughts. In a speech in Edinburgh earlier this year, Atkins had this to say: “I must admit that we simply do not know how the universe can come into being without intervention.”

This is where the game of pass-the-parcel winds up in a dead end — as, eventually, it must. A scientific theory is a falsifiable rule that relates cause to effect. If you push Dawkins and company far enough, you find yourself more or less where Aristotle was more than 2,000 years ago in stating his view that any chain of cause-and-effect must ultimately begin with an Uncaused Cause. No matter how far science advances, an explanation of ultimate origins must always — by the very definition of the scientific method — remain a non-scientific question.

A second prominent myth of scientific atheism is that evolution has no goal. Quite the opposite, of course, was true of the algorithm we used to optimize the factory. Evolution in nature is more complicated — but the complications don’t mean that the process is goalless, just that determining this goal would be so incomprehensibly hard that in practice it falls into the realm of philosophy rather than science.

One important complication is that evolution in nature proceeds against a more complex fitness function than “see how much output this factory creates.” The natural fitness landscape is defined by survival and reproduction, and it is constantly changing as the environment changes — for example, as new species arise or the climate becomes colder. It is prohibitively difficult to calculate the result of this process — but it is, in principle, calculable; the fitness landscape, after all, is only the product of the interaction of other physical processes.

A second major complication is that genetic strings in nature have complex structures and can evolve to some arbitrary length — unlike our factory example, where the simple “genetic string” had a fixed length of 100 positions. But, even in nature, the string must always have a finite length, as regulated by physical laws; and therefore the total number of potential combinations of genetic components remains finite. Dawkins says repeatedly that the number of possible genetic combinations is “all but infinite,” but this is just a very loaded way of saying “finite.”

The combination of a constantly changing fitness landscape and an extraordinarily large number of possible genomes means that scientists appropriately proceed as if the goal of evolution were incalculable, while from a philosophical perspective it remains calculable in principle, using only the information embedded in the initial conditions.

And here it’s especially important that we be clear about our terms. The scientific atheists sweep a lot of philosophical baggage into the term “random”: It is often used loosely to imply a senselessness, a basic lack of understandability, in natural occurrences. But in fact, even the “random” elements of evolution that influence the path it takes toward its goal — for example, mutation and crossover — are really pseudo-random. For example, if a specific mutation is caused by radiation hitting a nucleotide, both the radiation and its effect on the nucleotide are governed by normal physical laws. Human uncertainty in describing evolution, which as a practical matter we refer to as randomness, is reducible entirely to the impracticality of building a model that comprehensively considers things such as the idiosyncratic path of every photon in the universe compounded by the quantum-mechanistic uncertainty present in fundamental physical laws that govern the motion of such particles. As a practical matter, we lack the capability to compute either the goal or the path of evolution, but that is a comment about our limitations as observers, not about the process itself.

Accepting evolution, therefore, requires neither the denial of a Creator nor the loss of the idea of ultimate purpose. It resolves neither issue for us one way or the other.

But evolution has been empirically associated with materialism for a reason: It undermines some traditional religious notions. Contemplating a Creator who acts through a process as multi-layered as evolution tends to lead us to see the spiritual world in an increasingly abstract light. The risk to religion is that this accommodation can begin an inexorable process that leads to a theology so attenuated that it becomes vanishingly close to materialism.

Fortunately, it is possible to thread the intellectual needle: to defer to scientific explanations for non-ultimate physical processes, while still remaining within the central Judeo-Christian tradition.

One of the advantages of institutionalized religion is that it conserves insight. Ironically, dealing with evolution places us back in the company of Augustine and Aquinas, who were both forced to figure out how to reconcile powerful proto-scientific ideas with Christianity. They described God as acting through laws or processes. In about the year 400, Augustine described a view of Creation in which “seeds of potentiality” were established by God, which then unfolded through time in an incomprehensibly complicated set of processes. In the 13th century, Aquinas — working with the thought of Aristotle and Augustine — identified God with ultimate causes, while accepting naturalistic interpretations of secondary causes. Neither Augustine nor Aquinas was a proto-Darwinist: Augustine, for example, thought species were immutable. What is striking about both of them, however, is their insistence on understanding and incorporating the best available non-theological thinking into our religious views.

Relying on this deep intellectual heritage, most major denominations in the Western world have accepted evolution as fully consistent with theistic religious faith. Thoughtful conservatives would be wise to agree.

Mr. Manzi is the CEO of an applied-artificial-intelligence software company.

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‘Expelled’ Producers Deny Deceiving Scientists to Appear in Film (Christian Post, 071008)

Producers of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the film on Intelligent Design and Darwinism, have rejected claims made by some Darwinist scientists alleging they were tricked into being interviewed for the film.

The charges made by scientists who appeared in the film as proponents of Darwinian evolution entered the public spotlight when the New York Times published an article last month entitled “Scientists Feel Miscast in Film on Life’s Origin.”

In the Sept. 27 article, three scientists — Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion; Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education; and P.Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris — told the Times that they felt deceived by producers of Expelled.

Premise Media Corporation, the makers of the film featuring television personality Ben Stein, responded Thursday to accusations, denying any wrongdoing.

“There is some serious mistreatment and downright reprehensible behavior going on here,” said Executive Producer Walt Ruloff, “but I can assure you it’s not coming from us.

“We’re just the ones exposing it.”

In Expelled, Stein – best known for his role in Visine eye drops commercials – highlights the long-standing controversial debate between supporters of Darwinism, which suggests the universe was created by chance, and Intelligent Design, which argues that the creation of life and the universe are results of an intelligent “designer.”

Through interviews with both Intelligent Design and Darwinian Evolution proponents, the movie is said to expose “the intimidation, persecution and career destruction that takes place when any scientist dares dissent from the view that all life on earth is the mere result of random mutation and natural selection,” according to producers.

“When our audience sees the stories of the real victims of scientific malpractice they’re going to be outraged,” said Ruloff.

Dawkins, who has earned the label “Darwin’s Rottweiler” from the media, protested that makers of the movie did not inform him that they were representing “a creationist front,” in an e-mail written to the Times.

He also shared similar complaints with fellow atheist Meyers over the film’s title change from Crossroads: The Intersection of Science and Religion to of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Both Dawkins and Meyers claim that changing the film’s title amounted to deception.

Mark Mathis, one of the film’s producers, countered their allegations and said that they were a “bunch of hypocrites.”

According to the makers of the film, even Dawkins admitted that the title of his anti-religion documentary (Root of all Evil?) was chosen as a replacement for the original title late in the process. They maintain that movie’s title was changed on the advice of marketing experts.

Furthermore, Expelled producers pointed out that Dawkins is involved in a documentary that attacks Intelligent Design theory. It is the makers of A War on Science who are deceptive, according to Expelled producers, since they approached Discovery Institute as objective filmmakers and then portrayed the organization as religiously-motivated and anti-scientific.

Mathis, who set up the interviews for Expelled, said the scientists who were interviewed were well-informed beforehand.

“I went over all of the questions with these folks before the interviews and I e-mailed the questions to many of them days in advance,” said Mathis. “The lady [and gentlemen] doth protest too much, methinks.”

Expelled producers have asserted that film will portray the scientists interviewed in a way that is consistent with their actual viewpoints or other public statements.

Despite the issues he has with the film, Meyers says he and other scientists who felt miscast will not seek a lawsuit.

“[N]ot even in my private conversations with Dawkins and Eugenie Scott about this movie has anyone even brought up the possibility of suing or somehow interfering with the release,” wrote Meyers on his blog.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is scheduled for release in February 2008.

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Anti-Creationism Group Flip-Flops on Intelligent Design in Schools (Christian Post, 071008)

For its latest collection of position statements defending evolution education, the National Center of Scientific Education (NCSE) will include one from an area of study it had previously suggested as an alternative forum for Intelligent Design.

The lobby group’s third edition of Voices for Evolution will include a statement from the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) to explain its latest position on teaching Intelligent Design in the classroom.

“Social studies may, at first glance, seem to be a better fit for this approach to teaching intelligent design, but the same constitutional issues arise whether religious beliefs are taught in science or in the social studies curriculum,” read the NCSS statement, which was issued in May 2007.

The NCSS stated that “while the social studies classroom is the proper forum for the discussion of controversial issue,” it maintained that the “teaching religious beliefs as the equivalent of scientific theory is not consistent with the social studies.”

A contributor for “Evolution News & View,” a blog from a subgroup of the Discovery Institute, a think tank associated with the Intelligent Design movement, points out that the NCSE will go at great lengths to banish any line of thought inconsistent to the teaching of evolution — even if it means going back on its previous arguments.

“[A]fter endorsing censoring science classes and relegating intelligent design to discussion in social studies, the NCSE is now flip-flopping and praising censorship of social studies classes as well,” wrote Robert Crowther Friday on the blog for the Center for Science and Culture.

Crowther cited several examples from previous articles in which the NCSE and other supporters of evolution education proposed social studies as an appropriate forum for discussing non-Darwinian thoughts such as Creationism and Intelligent Design.

Furthermore, Crowther suggested that critics of Intelligent Design have strategically misrepresented the scientific claim as synonymous to Creationism to exclude it from being taught in science classes.

Opponents of Intelligent Design have criticized the claim, alleging that it is only a vehicle to inject religious teaching, mainly Creationism, into public schools and scientific debate. Intelligent Design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.

Jay Richards, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, told The Christian Post in an interview earlier this year that while the religious labeling of Intelligent Design is misguided, it serves the critic’s purpose.

“By attaching the label of religion to it, the person is essentially trying to privatize it, so it doesn’t have to be considered public evidence,” said Richards. “But the point of intelligent design’s argument is that it’s based on public evidence, the evidence from nature and the natural world.”

The Discovery Institute makes it clear on its website that Intelligent Design “theory” is neither based from nor upholds the Bible and is not the same as Creationism.

“The intellectual roots of intelligent design theory are varied,” explains the Discovery Institute on its website.

“Plato and Aristotle both articulated early versions of design theory, as did virtually all of the founders of modern science.”

“Intelligent design theory is simply an effort to empirically detect whether the ‘apparent design’ in nature acknowledged by virtually all biologists is genuine design (the product of an intelligent cause) or is simply the product of an undirected process such as natural selection acting on random variations,” the group adds.

In contrast, “Creationism is focused on defending a literal reading of the Genesis account, usually including the creation of the earth by the Biblical God a few thousand years ago.

“Unlike creationism, the scientific theory of intelligent design is agnostic regarding the source of design,” the Discovery Institute clarifies.

Other explanations surrounding Intelligent Design theory posted on the group’s website also clarify that Intelligent Design does not reject evolutionary theory, if “evolution” is defined by “change over time,” or “that living things are related by common ancestry.”

However, Discovery Institute does challenge a dominant form of evolutionary theory known as neo-Darwinism, which “contends that evolution is driven by natural selection acting on random mutations, an unpredictable and purposeless process that ‘as no discernable direction or goal, including survival of a species.’

“It is this specific claim made by neo-Darwinism that intelligent design theory directly challenges,” the group states.

Regarding NCSE’s initial suggestion that Intelligent Design be taught in the social studies curriculum, Discovery Institute’s Richards said even if it were allowed, the theory would be irrelevant in that discipline. Since the design argument draws from science disciplines such as biology, chemistry, astronomy, or physics, it would be most appropriate in a science class.

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What Darwinism Can’t Do: The Edge of Evolution (Christian Post, 071019)

The intelligent design (ID) movement has been accused of a lot of things over the years. Among the mildest of those accusations is that ID is just religion masquerading as science.

Anyone who could seriously think that, cannot be paying attention. Intelligent design, as defined by the Discovery Institute, teaches simply “that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected [random] process such as natural selection.” That’s it. It does not attempt to define or describe that cause. Most scientists who subscribe to intelligent design do believe in some form of evolution. And some of them are not even believers in the Bible—they are secularists. They simply believe that Darwinism does not have all the answers, especially about how life originated. (Darwin himself never pretended certainty on that.)

Now, with the publication of Michael Behe’s second book, there is little excuse left for anyone to remain ignorant of what intelligent design actually is. Behe, you may remember, is the professor of biological science from Lehigh University who shook up the scientific world when he published Darwin’s Black Box over a decade ago. Now he has written The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. Behe leaves no doubt of his belief in natural selection. He even goes much further than many of us, including myself, by declaring his belief in a common ancestor.

In short, he is more than willing to acknowledge common ground with the evolutionists. All he is trying to show here is that there are certain things that Darwinism cannot answer. But even for that, he gets pilloried. The New York Times showed Behe’s book the ultimate disrespect by assigning someone who had publicly disagreed with and denounced him to review it: the vehement “anti-theist” Richard Dawkins, of all people. So much for the objectivity of the New York Times. That would be roughly the equivalent of the New York Times asking me to review one of Dawkins’s books. Fat chance.

Naturally, Dawkins accuses Behe of doing exactly what he does not do: Namely, he suggests that Behe states that where evolution reaches its limits, “God must step in to help.”

Behe does no such thing. What he does is provide a series of case studies, such as the malaria virus, the AIDS virus, and the human immune system, and shows what evolution did or did not do for them. For example, he shows that although human cells have evolved in many ways to combat malaria, many humans are still vulnerable to it—and in some cases, those human cells are even worse off than they were before. This means that evolution is not always as progressive as Darwinists would have us believe. As Behe puts it, what Dawkins and others have called an “arms race” is really much more like “trench warfare,” unleashing forces that can damage organisms as easily as it can help them. So evolution has its limits.

I suggest you ignore the forces that would stifle all dissent, and take a look at Behe’s book The Edge of Evolution. Even if you do not agree with everything in it, as I do not, you do not need to follow the Darwinist line that everything you disagree with must be squashed. Dare to think for yourself. You just might learn what the Darwinists and the anti-theists do not want you to know.

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Darwinism; Too Old-Fashioned To Be True (townhall.com, 071025)

By Marvin Olasky

New York Times columnist John Tierney recently offered a materialist version of “intelligent design”: All of us are actually characters in a computer simulation devised by some technologically advanced future civilization.

Fanciful to the extreme, sure, but the growing number of such theories — life comes from the past (Mars, when it was theoretically livable) or future (Tierney) — is one more indication that Darwinism no longer satisfies. Reporters pretending to referee the origin debate used to have it easy: slick evolutionists vs. hick creationists, progress vs. regress. Now, Darwinism is looking fuddy-duddy, and sophisticated critiques of it are becoming more diverse.

I interviewed Michael Behe, author of “Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution” and a new book, “The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism.” This Lehigh University biology professor points out that “Darwin and his contemporaries knew very little about the cell, which is the foundation of life. Microscopes of that era were too crude to see many critical details. So 19th-century scientists thought the cell was simple protoplasm, like a piece of microscopic Jell-O.”

Behe explained what has changed: “Now we know that the cell is chock-full of sophisticated nanotechnology, literally machines made from molecules. The same goes for the universe. In Darwin’s era, the universe was thought to be pretty simple. Now we know its basic laws are balanced on a razor’s edge to allow for life and that our planet may be the only one in the universe that could support intelligent life. The more we know about nature, the more design we see.”

We also have data now from a half-century of careful malaria-watching, which — because malaria reproduce so quickly — lets us see what happens to thousands of generations of parasites that are under constant attack from man-made drugs. Darwin predicted that random mutation and natural selection would lead to the development of new species, but no new kinds of malaria have emerged, just tiny changes in existing strains.

The mass killer HIV also has provided evidence to disprove Darwin. Behe points out that HIV, like malaria, “is a microbe that occurs in astronomical numbers. What’s more, its mutation rate is 10,000 times greater than that of most other organisms. So in just the past few decades, HIV has actually undergone more of certain kinds of mutations than all cells have endured since the beginning of the world. Yet all those mutations, while medically important, have changed the functioning virus very little.”

Behe’s summary of HIV: “It still has the same number of genes that work in the same way. There is no new molecular machinery. If we see that Darwin’s mechanism can only do so little even when given its best opportunities, we can decisively conclude that random mutation did not build the machinery of life.”

It’s important to remember that Behe and other “intelligent design” believers are talking about macroevolution, a change from one kind of creature to another, and not the microevolution of longer beaks, different-colored wings and so forth; no one doubts that microevolution happens. Behe sees development as an incredibly difficult maze that an intelligent agent could navigate but an utterly blind process could not — and Darwin’s most radical claim was that evolution is utterly blind.

One more analogy: Some Darwinists have portrayed evolution as a walk up the stairs of a building, but it’s hard to keep going higher if many of the steps are missing. Behe says Darwin did not know that “there are many biological steps, called amino acids, between biological floors, and many are missing. Even plentiful microbes have great difficulty jumping missing biological stairs to go from floor to floor. So we can conclude that life did not ascend by Darwinian evolution.”

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Intelligent Design Group Accuses PBS of Promoting Unconstitutional Teaching (Christian Post, 071112)

A leading intelligent design think tank says a teacher’s guide issued by the Public Broadcasting System in conjunction with a program on the 2005 Dover intelligent design trial is “likely unconstitutional.”

PBS had issued the “Briefing Packet for Educators” for the two-hour NOVA program, called “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial,” scheduled to premiere Tuesday at 8 p.m.

Experts at the Discovery Institute say the guide promotes teaching practices that unconstitutionally injects religion into the classroom.

“They are encouraging teachers to do things like have discussion questions such as – ‘Can you accept evolution and still believe in religion? Answer: Yes. The common view that evolution is inherently anti-religious is simply false,’” spokesman Rob Crowther said, according to OneNewsNow.

Critics of intelligent design have often criticized the teaching as a ploy to introduce religion into schools. They charge intelligent design with touting the same beliefs Creationism – the biblically-based belief that God created the universe.

However, proponents of intelligent design contend that while evidence from nature and the natural world suggests an “intelligent designer” is behind the creation in the universe, there is not enough scientific evidence to identify the designer as God.

“Far be it from us to accuse PBS of kind of being agenda-driven, or having an anti-intelligent design bend, but it is interesting that this is the tact they’ve taken and now there they are injecting religion right into the classroom,” Crowther added.

Furthermore, the guide does not provide an accurate portrayal of intelligent design, according to Dr. John West, vice president for public policy and legal affairs with Discovery Institute.

“The teaching guide is riddled with factual errors that misrepresent both the standard definition of intelligent design and the beliefs of those scientists and scholars who support the theory,” said West in a report by the Republican Valley.

The Discovery Institute has sent copies of the teacher’s guide to 15 attorneys and legal scholars, who specialize in constitutional law, for review, said Crowther.

Crowther wrote on his blog Friday that the group will also be watching the program and posting corrections to any pieces of information that they find misleading.

Tuesday’s program will follow the federal case of Kitzmiller v. Dover School District and feature trial reenactments based on court transcripts and interviews with key participants, according to PBS.

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Creation Museum Surpasses Year-Long Attendance Goal in Less Than 6 Months (Christian Post, 071105)

A 60,000 square-foot museum that teaches about the literal six days of Creation has proven to be more popular than expected, surpassing its projected first-year attendance in less than six months since its opening.

The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky. welcomed its 250,000th visitor on Friday, reported Ken Ham, founder of Answers of Genesis, the evangelical group behind the $27 million facility.

“We praise the Lord for this,” said Ham in his Nov. 3 blog entry on the organization’s website. “I still remember the mocking of certain people in the secular world that the Museum would fail as people would not be interested – and some in the Christian world who said it would be a white elephant!”

Officials now expect nearly 400,000 people to come to the Cincinnati-area museum by the year’s end, reported The Courier-Journal. The museum averages 1,500 to 4,000 visitors per day.

Museum spokeswoman Melany Ethridge credited the positive response to the dramatic exhibits and ongoing media interest from Europe and elsewhere.

Around 10,000 people have paid for year-round access but the museum still relies partly on donations.

The facility opened on Memorial Day earlier this year amid protests and petitions.

Museum visionaries had designed the anti-evolution exhibits to reflect their belief in Young Earth creationism – a literal interpretation of Genesis that claims the world is only 6,000 years old, dinosaurs appeared on the same day God created other land animals, and geologic features such as the Grand Canyon and fossils were created in a global flood during the time of Noah.

Non-Christians and Christians alike have criticized the way museum organizers framed scientific evidence to support views attributed to the Bible.

Others have praised the museum for representing their worldview of creation.

Despite all the controversy, Ham has expressed his gratitude to both supporters and protestors for all the publicity – positive and negative.

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Politics, Religion, and Evolution: The Three Don’ts (Christian Post, 071113)

I have written many articles over the years often addressing controversial issues, some of which have provoked strong reactions. However, no other subject so provokes as the suggestion that Darwin’s theory of evolution is false.

In my recent article, James Watson is Not a Racist; He’s a Darwinist! I commented on the recent statements of noted scientist and evolutionist, James Watson. You may recall that Watson suggested that black people were inherently less intelligent due to their stunted evolutionary development. As I pointed out, Watson was simply speaking in a way that revealed the ethical dilemma of Darwinism in which morality as we understand it has no place. True to form, the evolutionists were outraged.

One respondent wrote:

Utter rubbish! And inconsistent with any Christian ideas of truth-seeking. [sic] Even if Darwin’s theories have been used by some to promote unethical behaviour that does not mean that Darwinian evolution is inconsistent with any ethical system. [sic] Shame on you. If this is the sort of absurd, manipulative reasoning that you need to buttress your faith, then I suggest you pray for guidance on why you think you need to do evil (to lie) in order to do Good.

First, I did not say that Darwinian evolution is inconsistent with any ethical system; I wrote that is was inconsistent with Judeo-Christian ethics and morality. If it is to be logically consistent, Darwinism demands a completely new understanding of morality in which the preservation of the fittest becomes the highest moral good.

In Descent of Man, Darwin tried to demonstrate that all human traits—including moral behavior—are different in degree, but not in kind, from other organisms. Darwin argued that all human behavior [including morality] was a result of biological determinism and not human reason. This implies that we do not possess a rational moral nature but that all our actions are driven by the biologically-induced aim of survival. Logically speaking, this aim would be [and must be] opposed to self-sacrifice or altruism of any kind if such acts do not contribute to your prosperity and survival.

Another reader writes:

Mr. Craven, I strongly suggest you take the time to read or at least take a class on evolution. Your ENTIRE thesis here is based on one WRONG assumption—evolution has no goal. It is simply the ability to pass on heritable traits that allow the organism to thrive in the environment…. There is no right and wrong or good and bad in science and nature.

This is typical of the silly statements so often made by evolutionists. On the one hand this person assumes Darwinian or “macro” evolution to be fact. The only fact related to Darwin’s theory is the observation of “natural selection” or genetic adaptation occurring within species. This was Darwin’s unique contribution to evolutionary theory. Others prior to Darwin had developed evolutionary theories but none had ever identified a plausible mechanism by which such evolutionary changes could have occurred. Natural selection is an observable phenomenon but again, only within a species. The theoretical begins and remains to this day at the point when you assume this same process occurs between species.

Secondly, Darwin’s theory of evolution does indeed have a “goal”—providing an alternative to the biblical explanation of origins. Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin was a noted intellectual, physician and writer who, long before Charles, theorized an evolutionary alternative to biblical origins. The senior Darwin strongly opposed Christianity going so far as to include “Credulity, Superstitious Hope, and the Fear of Hell in his catalogue of diseases.”

Finally, this reader’s statement reveals the self-contradictory position of Darwinians who embrace Judeo-Christian morality. On the one hand he objects to my moral criticism that Darwinism is racist but on the other he writes, “There is no right and wrong or good and bad in science and nature.” Exactly! If nature is the ultimate and final reality, there is no universal right or wrong and each individual is at liberty to live in whatever way best serves their selfish interest of personal progress and survival. So by what authority can Darwinism condemn racism? This is just one of the areas where Darwinism conflicts with reality demonstrating its fallacy.

Darwinism proposes a completely alternative reality to that of the Judeo-Christian worldview. This is not just some collateral theory of life that fits nicely into the existing philosophical structure, i.e. the biblical worldview—it completely undermines this perspective and everything we understand about reality, replacing it with a radically different interpretation.

Concepts such as compassion, mercy, forgiveness, as well as the belief in human equality are virtues revealed exclusively through and established by a Christian interpretation of life and reality. These virtues are recognized as uniquely human and nowhere relevant to the animal world.

My favorite response is this one:

How dare you label the majority who realise the sense and logic of evolution as racist. At least pick an intelligent argument for creationism—oh, I forgot, there is not one.

I love the righteous indignation. Not only is this position logically inconsistent but it is often the only defense offered by evolutionists; simply label the alternative as being unintelligent. This is certainly the premise of those who attack any discussion of Intelligent Design.

Make no mistake, Darwinism is not science, it is philosophy. It is dogma! This, I think, accounts for both its proponents’ vehement defense and aggressive reaction to any challenge.

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‘Expelled’ Exposes Plight of Darwin Doubters (Christian Post, 071130)

WASHINGTON – A provocative film to be released next year is uncovering a conspiracy among educators to “expel” professors who question Darwinism.

Highly acclaimed professors have lost their jobs, been denied tenure, and rejected of subsequent teaching positions for raising questions on Darwin’s theory of evolution, said speakers at a promotional event this week for the film “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” featuring Ben Stein.

“Soon after I lost my job at George Mason [University] for questioning Darwinism, I was working at Northern Virginia Community College,” said biology professor Caroline Crocker, who is featured in “Expelled,” on Tuesday

“I overheard the administrator (at NVCC) saying to my supervisor that she should get rid of me,” Crocker recalled at the event hosted by the Family Research Council. “I made her life easy and said I found another job.”

But Crocker continued to face persecution in subsequent jobs with bosses telling her they ran out of money after she worked a year, even though they had an NIH (National Institute of Health) grant.

“I was offered three or four jobs after many applications. Every one of them after being offered at the interview the job, within two weeks I was phoned and told that there is no money for this position,” the biology professor recalled.

“I thought it was a little strange that they had money to advertise and to interview but didn’t actually have the money for the position,” she noted. “Since then I was told by someone at the NIH, ‘Don’t bother, you’re blacklisted.’ That is what he told me, but I don’t know if it’s true.”

In defense, Crocker denies teaching creationism at George Mason University. Rather, she contends that she taught only one lecture on the evidence for and against evolution and did not even mention creationism.

“What I really wanted to do was in an intellectually honest manner give the evidence for evolution, but also the question about evolution – the scientific critiques – that’s all I did,” Crocker said.

She has not been able to find a lawyer to represent her against George Mason since her first lawyer dropped her case.

In response to cases such as Crocker’s, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” highlights the long-standing controversial debate between supporters of Darwinism and supporters of Intelligent Design, which argues that the creation of life and the universe are results of an intelligent “designer” and not by chance as the former theory suggests.

“There are people out there who want to keep science in a little box where it can’t possibly touch God,” said Stein in the film’s trailer. “Scientists are not even allowed to think thoughts that involve an intelligent creator.”

Executive producer Walt Ruloff said, “When our audience sees the stories of the real victims of scientific malpractice they’re going to be outraged.”

Todd Nordquist, the community liaison at the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, also spoke at the event about the battle of worldviews where currently scientific materialism dominates.

An “Expelled Road Show Tour” is currently underway and is scheduled to hit 40 college campuses across the country by the film’s February 2008 release date.

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Poll: More Americans Believe in Devil than Darwin (Christian Post, 071203)

More Americans believe in a literal hell and the devil than in Darwin’s theory of evolution, a new poll found.

Over half of Americans, 62%, believe in hell and the devil compared to only 42% of those surveyed who said they believe in Darwin’s theory, according to the findings of the recently released Harris poll.

The poll of 2,455 U.S. adults, taken Nov. 7-13, found that 82% of respondents believe in God, according to Reuters. It further showed that 79% believe in miracles, 75% in heaven, and 72% of Americans believe that Jesus Christ is God or the Son of God.

Yet Christians are far from a homogenous group and a break-up of respondents based on Christian traditions shows discrepancies in their level of belief.

Born-again Christians, for example, are more likely to believe in miracles (95%) as compared to Catholics (87%) and Protestants (89%), according to the poll.

On the other hand, only 16% of born-again Christians believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution compared to 43% of Catholics and 30% of Protestants.

Interestingly, more born-again Christians – a term usually referring to evangelical Protestants – believe in witches (37%) than mainline Protestants or Catholics, both at 32%, according to Reuters.

The poll results, which were released last Thursday, show the high level of religiosity in the United States. It also helps explain the strong effort to teach the “intelligent design” theory in U.S. public schools alongside evolution. Intelligent design contends that life is too complex to have evolved by chance, but rather requires an intelligent being to design it.

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Scientists Closer to Creating Artifical Life, Produce Synthetic Bacteria DNA (Foxnews, 080124)

WASHINGTON — It’s another step in the quest to create artificial organisms: Scientists have synthesized the complete DNA of a type of bacteria.

The experiment, published online Thursday by the journal Science, isn’t a living germ, just its genetic structure.

But scientists from Maryland’s J. Craig Venter Institute called it the largest manmade stretch of DNA to date, and therefore a logical step in the fledgling field of “synthetic biology” that aims to build new organisms that work differently than nature intended, such as producing new fuels.

Report: Scientists Create New Life Form in Lab

The Venter group started with some off-the-shelf laboratory-made DNA fragments. They overlapped and joined these stretches to make ever-larger chunks of genetic material until they finally had a manmade copy of the entire genome of a small bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium, a genital germ.

Last year, Venter’s team performed a “genome transplant”: Researchers transplanted all of the genes from one species of Mycoplasma into another, switching a goat germ into a cattle germ. Somehow, the transplant itself sparked the donor genes to start working; Venter uses a computer analogy to say it “booted up.”

Now he must test if this new artificial Mycoplasma genome can boot up, too — by putting the DNA into a living cell to see if takes over and becomes a synthetic organism.

“I don’t view that we’re creating life,” Venter told The Associated Press last year in describing this series of experiments. “I view that we’re modifying life to come up with new life forms by designing and synthetically constructing chromosomes.”

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In Praise of PETA (Breakpoint, 080212)

By Chuck Colson

Darwin Day and Worldview

It has taken me a long time to get to this point, but I am finally ready to praise People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or as they are more commonly known, PETA. This organization really gets it when it comes to worldview. In fact, PETA accepts and follows the logical consequences of a worldview better than almost any other group I can think of.

Let me explain.

Today is Darwin Day, the 199th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. The Darwin Day Celebration website explains that Darwin Day “is an international celebration of science and humanity.” The site suggests that we hold “civic ceremonies with official proclamations, educational symposia, birthday parties, art shows, book discussions, lobby days, games, protests, and dinner parties.”

If you think that sounds a little excessive, you ain’t seen nothing yet. As Regis Nicoll wrote on our blog, The Point, next year will be proclaimed “the year of Darwin” to celebrate Darwin’s 200th birthday. British organizations are planning an “Evolution Megalab” to teach visitors of all ages how to “see evolution at work in the natural world around them.” And that will be just one of “an unequalled spate of high-profile broadcasting and public events throughout the world.”

Here’s where PETA comes in. PETA was celebrating Darwin Day long before there was an official Darwin Day. You can see it in everything it does—from its ads comparing the slaughter of animals to the Holocaust, to PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk’s famous statement that “When it comes to pain, love, joy, loneliness, and fear, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.”

What does that have to do with Darwinism? Everything. To a Darwinist, you see, there is no distinction between human beings and animals. We all came about by chance; we are made of the same “stuff,” and we all end up as nothing more than dust. Instead of recognizing humans as bearers of God’s image, Darwinism sees us as nothing more than competitively successful bipeds with opposable thumbs. Forget any talk of human dignity.

And that is exactly the worldview that PETA lives by. If Darwinism—which we teach in the schools—is true, then they are right: Slaughtering and eating animals is just as bad as the Holocaust. It is cannibalism. If Darwinism is true, then PETA was correct when it recently compared the American Kennel Club to the Ku Klux Klan for trying to create a “master race” of dogs. Charles Darwin and Ingrid Newkirk are so much on the same page that without Darwin, there could be no PETA. It is a perfect example of following a worldview to its logical conclusion.

You have gathered by now, I hope, that the first part of this commentary was satirical. But it is no joke that the kind of thinking I am describing is exactly what the Darwinian worldview can lead to. Darwin Day is not really about parties and science fairs; it is about a total loss of moral transcendence and the loss of dignity of human life.

And the real tragedy is that people like PETA are more faithful in following their worldview than many Christians are in following ours. Christians who buy into Darwinian evolution need to understand what they are really saying: that their God considers them of no more value than a rat, or a pig, or a dog.

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Ben Stein Wins Intelligent Design Award for ‘Expelled’ (Christian Post, 080218)

Ben Stein’s work in his new controversial movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” has earned him praises and now an award from the intelligent design community.

The multi-talented star of his Comedy Central show “Win Ben Stein’s Money,” who is also known for his lead role in the film “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” was named the recipient of the 2008 Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth, an award created to honor one of the founding fathers of the intelligent design movement.

Stein will receive the award through Biola University’s masters in science and religion program in a ceremony on March 27, one month before “Expelled” hits theaters.

In his movie, Stein explores the long-standing controversial debate between supporters of Darwinism and proponents of intelligent design. Through interviews with experts and professors from both camps, he discovers an elitist scientific establishment that punishes the scientific proponents of intelligent design because they reject some of the claims of Darwin’s theory of evolution.

“If you just stand up and question Darwinism – that’s it – your career is over,” Caroline Crocker, a former biology teacher at George Mason University, shared in the film’s trailer.

She is among several professors featured in the film who claims they were ridiculed, denied tenure and even fired in some cases for discussing problems with Darwinism.

Makers of the documentary said in a recent teleconference that the movie doesn’t seek to champion intelligent design as the sole truth but calls for more academic freedom, where challenges to any scientific theory including Darwinism would be fairly considered.

Biola, a private Christian university in Southern California, established the award in 2004 to honor legal scholar and Berkeley law professor Phillip E. Johnson, who was the award’s first recipient. Johnson, who became a born-again Christian as a tenured professor, is the co-founder of the Center for Science and Culture of Discovery Institute, the nation’s leading think tank on intelligent design.

“The award,” noted Biola, “recognizes Johnson’s pivotal role in advancing our understanding of design in the universe by opening up informed dissent to Darwinian and materialistic theories of evolution.”

In 2006, the award was given to British philosopher Antony Flew, once considered the most prominent defender of atheism in the English-speaking world. He argued in books such as God and Philosophy (1966) and The Presumption of Atheism (1984) that one should presuppose atheism until evidence for God proves otherwise. He later abandoned his long-held atheism on account of design arguments and after “following the evidence where it leads.”

Stein will be the third recipient of the Johnson award.

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Wiring and Switches (Breakpoint, 080213)

By Chuck Colson

Evolutionary Foolishness

Ten years ago, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker offered a Darwinian explanation for infanticide. Pinker wrote, “A new mother will first coolly assess the infant and her situation and only in the next few days begin to see it as a unique and wonderful individual.”

This nonsense prompted the late journalist Michael Kelly to reply, “Yes, that was my wife all over: cool as a cucumber as she assessed whether to keep her first-born child or toss him out the window.”

Pinker, the celebrated Harvard professor and science popularizer, is still at it, and the results are no less nonsensical.

In a recent New York Times Magazine article titled, “The Moral Instinct,” he gave a Darwinian account for what Nietzsche called the “genealogy of morals.”

Pinker characterized both the “content” of our “moral judgments” and the “way we arrive at them” as “often questionable.” Far from being the product of reason, much less divine revelation, morality is an “an abstract spec sheet” that has been hardwired into our brains by evolution, as if senses could be hardwired by a random process.

But according to Pinker, this “spec sheet” is the source of such universal human moral concerns as not doing harm, being fair, and altruism. Somewhere in what is called the “environment of original adaptation,” these behaviors gave our ancestors an advantage in the struggle for survival.

This leads Pinker, like other Darwinians, to redefine altruism and fairness as little more than enlightened “self-interest.” We are generous toward others because evolution has “taught” us that this is the best way to ensure their generosity toward us. What we call “fairness” is really an unwritten pact not to cheat each other and, thus, promote social harmony and community.

The problem with these superficially plausible explanations is that real human beings, as opposed to theoretical ones, do not live this way. If altruism is “hardwired,” many people are poorly wired, indeed: They are stingy and cheat their neighbors with regularity.

Other people are profoundly generous, not only to their friends and family, but also to complete strangers. They are willing to make do with less and even go without, to help others in need. And they would much rather suffer an injustice than commit one.

It is not that these people are unaware of the advantages to be gained from being selfish and unfair—it is that their morality is rooted in something that enables them to be good, even when being good comes at a cost.

Because Pinker fails to describe people as they really are, he does not answer the question, “Why be good?” Why be generous or honest when all the incentives point the other way? Why give your life for someone else? His utilitarianism can neither compel nor inspire people to go beyond self-interest.

To do that, you need the Christian account. What Pinker calls “hardwiring” is what we call being created in the image of God. Since we know that this life is not all there is, we can transcend self-interest.

Without these, we have only morality as a “spec sheet” and humans as moral calculators. As Kelly put it, quoting Orwell, “You have to be an intellectual to believe such nonsense. No ordinary man could be such a fool.”

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Myths about ‘Expelled’: Don’t Believe Everything You Hear (Christian Post, 080412)

Chuck Colson

If you have heard of the new documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, opening April 18, chances are you have heard all kinds of distortions and myths about it. So let me set the record straight about some of the most common myths.

Myth #1: Darwinists interviewed for this film were tricked into participating.

Not so. Each scientist interviewed for Expelled, on both sides of the evolution debate, knew who would do the interview and what it was for. Each of them signed a release, allowing the producers to use the footage of their interviews.

Myth #2: The film is anti-science.

Wrong again. Many distinguished scientists were interviewed for this film and given the chance to express their views. Just like their Darwinist counterparts, the advocates of intelligent design and their supporters who are interviewed are there to talk about science, not to dismiss it. These are people like Cambridge physicist John Polkinghorne; Oxford mathematician and philosopher John Lennox; journalist Pamela Winnick, who has received hate mail for covering the issue; and biologist Caroline Crocker, who was fired from George Mason University for discussing intelligent design in the classroom. Some of them are religious believers; some are not. But what they share is a commitment to science and the unfettered pursuit of truth. Expelled is not anti-science; it is anti-censorship.

Myth #3: Ben Stein, the actor and writer who hosts the movie, has lost his mind.

Bringing up this very issue in a conference call, Stein quipped that he probably has, “but it was a long time ago . . . probably sometime around 1958.” Well, I have known Stein well for years, and he is as bright as a button and anything but out of his mind. On a serious note, Stein and his film’s producers explained that the mud that people are flinging at him is just one small example of what happens to people who question Darwinian orthodoxy. The original idea for Expelled, said co-producer and software engineer Walt Ruloff, came to him when he was working on a project with a group of biotechnologists and learned “that there was a whole series of questions that could not be asked.”

The prevailing ideology among many scientists—it turned out—he concluded, was keep your mouth shut, take the research money, and publish only the data that fits with “the party line.” The issue that concerns Ruloff and the others behind Expelled is whether the scientific establishment in this country is going to allow genuine “freedom of inquiry,” or simply shut up—and slander—those who do not toe the line.

Given all this, Ben Stein states, “As long as the cause is right, I’m happy to be in an uphill struggle.”

Myth #4: Popular author and atheist Richard Dawkins tells Ben Stein in this film that there could have been a designer of life on earth, but it would have had to have been “a higher intelligence” that had itself evolved “to a very high level . . . and seeded some form of life on this planet.”

Well, actually . . . that one is not a myth. He really did say it—striking admission, though it is.

So, I urge you to go see Expelled when it opens at a theater near you. Believe me, in this case the truth really is stranger—and more compelling—than any fiction the film’s detractors could possibly dream up.

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How to Share Your Faith Using Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (Christian Post, 080418)

Are faith and science truly at odds? If you’ve ever sat through the average high school biology class you might be inclined to answer that question with a resounding “Yes!” Should they be?

That’s the question Ben Stein’s upcoming movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” tackles with a mix of deadpan humor and thought-provoking insight. Stein invites you along on his journey as he lays bare the reality that teachers, students and scientists are being silenced and persecuted for the fact that they believe there is evidence of “design” in nature. Stein’s inquiries uncover the harsh reality that questioning Darwinian evolution, despite the increasing scientific evidence that challenges the theory and points toward an Intelligent Designer (“God”), is enough to get you ridiculed and sometimes fired.

“Expelled” makes a strong case for challenging the existing academic status quo and demanding that the free exchange of ideas, so highly-valued in other areas of academic inquiry, be extended to the origins of life debate. Stein documents the close-minded treatment many scientists give these new evidences for design. To learn more about these scientific evidences, you can check out Expelled’s free leader guide on the movie’s website.

Stein actually captured footage of ‘famous’ atheist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, acknowledging that he is more inclined to believe that life originated on earth as a result of a visit from aliens, than to entertain the scientific possibility that an Intelligent Designer could exist. No surprise here, but Dawkins is reportedly a bit upset about how he comes across in the movie…

Why is this whole debate about Intelligent Design even important? Because Scripture tells us the natural world is a billboard for God’s existence, if only you have the eyes to see it. Check out these passages from the Bible:

The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display his craftsmanship. Day after day they continue to speak; night after night they make him known. They speak without a sound or word; their voice is never heard. Yet their message has gone throughout the earth, and their words to all the world (Psalm 19:1-4).

Since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse (Romans 1:19-20).

The freedom to follow the scientific evidence down whatever road it leads, including the road that points to an Intelligent Designer, is a deep-seated longing in the human soul!

“Expelled” provides a great opportunity for you to engage your unreached friends (particularly those with a bent toward science) in spiritual conversation. So consider buying your friends a ticket to see this movie and plan some God-talk time to debrief after the movie. Here are some ideas to help you launch your conversation:

• Do you think Intelligent Design is a legitimate scientific theory on the origin of life? Why or why not? Listen and share what you believe. For help with this go to http://www.getexpelled.com/leaders.php

• Do you think scientists should have the freedom to follow the scientific evidence wherever it leads? Do you think they currently have that freedom?

• Have you ever had a personal experience where you felt uncomfortable because you believe a Designer had a hand in creating life?

• Does it matter what’s taught in schools about this topic? Why or why not?

• Do you think this topic has an impact on how people answer larger questions like “what is the meaning and purpose of life?”

Colossians 1:17 tells us, He existed before anything else, and he holds all creation together. As a believer, you can have confidence in knowing that the Intelligent Designer holds all creation together. Take the opportunity to you share this Good News with your friends this week.

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Response to Movie “Expelled” Proves Its Point: Man Has Not Evolved (townhall.com, 080422)

By Nina May

In our office on Capitol Hill, we have a graffiti wall that has been there for almost 30 years. One of my favorite benign scribblings is not only humorous, but in a cute way, shows who will ultimately win in this pitiful battle of man vs. God. The little ditty was, “God is Dead . . . Nietzsche, 1891,” followed by . . . “Nietzsche is dead . . . God, 1900”. At first blush you laugh, but then the reality of what that statement says, should cause true believers to be sad, not only for Nietzsche’s fate but also for those today who share his beliefs.

It is not that they should be forbidden from having these beliefs, or forced to accept any other belief system. But the reality of those who deny the existence of God is that they want to foist that limited view on the rest of the world, and have been successful in several cultures throughout history in perpetuating that very myopic opinion.

There is a wonderful new documentary out, called Expelled, produced by Ben Stein, that looks not only at the conflict between the two views of whether or not God created all we behold, or if it just happened by accident. It looks at the move by the unbelievers to keep the concept and even discussion of a “God possibility” out of the marketplace. The film successfully tracks the history of “godless” nations, their inhumanity to man, and the ultimate failure of their systems while tracing the move to eradicate God from the educational system in the U.S., intimidating professors and scientists who even suggest that creative design is not only possible, but a reality.

As interesting as it is to track the desperation of god-denying apologists, it is more interesting to read their rantings in response to the very simple supposition in the film that creationism should at least be allowed to be discussed as a viable alternative to . . . well . . . to what? It reminds me of the joke where man claims he is God and can do anything God can do and better, so God says, cool, make a man like I did, out of dust.

The arrogant atheist reaches down to grab a handful of dirt and God says, “Uh ah, make your own dirt.”

So where did it begin, and if it was as simple as a big bang, then recreate it. If man really did evolve from an ameba . . . a simple one celled creature, then certainly he should be able to make a man from one today. With all the science, the technology, the internet, and the huge crowd of followers desperate to prove there is no God and that man, in his total stupidity, really thinks he can become one, then prove it. Has anyone seen a perfect man yet . . . besides Jesus of course? How many have come back from the dead, walked the earth for 40 days then ascended into heaven leaving men and women willing to die to keep that truth alive?

These men and women went forth into a godless world where the smallest infraction could find you hanging on a cross for hours until you literally drowned from the fluid rising in your lungs. They would be the weekly entertainment in lion infested arenas, with the cheers of a ruthless, godless crowd, being the last sound they would hear on earth. We have seen brutal dictators who reject God, setting themselves in that lofty position only to exemplify the very opposite characteristics by slaughtering, torturing, dehumanizing and devaluing all life. Yeah, that’s the kind of god we want to follow. And with all that power, none of these self-appointed gods have ever been able to make a flower or a hummingbird.

As though it is a new idea to discuss creationism in the arena of science exploration, and this movie has exposed a truth that has never been discussed, the responses to its release have been amazing. But oddly, the most venomous attacks have been responses to a press release, to the media, which are on “press lists.” It is so cute to see these professional journalists send back, expletive deleted responses ending with, “Take me off your list.” ……..Oooookkkkk. So that means, you, oh brilliant journalist, want to be taken off the key media list that disseminates all the press releases for all the major activities in the country. Yeah, you could be god. Here is a sample of the brilliance of man . . . “Expelled will open wide on the 18th, but mostly in rural and poor neighborhoods. It’s got just one theater in all of New York City, in Times Square, none in places like Beverly Hills or wealthier, better-educated urban neighborhoods where more “evolved” people might live.”

Wow, that statement, in a review of the film, is a perfect illustration as to the dangers of the very elitist, arrogant supposition that man slithered out from under a rock, sans divine coercion. A person who thinks they are god sees everything through a prism of shifting absolutes and a sense of superiority over those he does not know, and what he can not see. To suggest that people in Beverly Hills, New York City, Times Square, etc. are better educated and more “evolved” is a perfect illustration of what the movie Expelled is trying to say.

The great thing about this discussion, is the blatant hypocrisy when you consider the fact that this film is being vilified by the very open-minded left, who will argue to the death that alternative lifestyles should be celebrated, embraced and encouraged. Yet the alternative lifestyle of believing in a creator, who made each of us in His own image, is not only reviled and marginalized, but those who express this belief are condemned as not being smart enough to even engage in the discussion. We are the inner-city ideologies, while the brilliant bourgeoisie live in Beverly Hills and New York City.

The polemics of the discussion of the theory of evolution versus creative design, is that it is so reminiscent of the flat earth society where any discussion of the possibility of a rounder playing field was met with not only similar elitist derision, but certain death. I guess it is a good thing that these poor “journalists” took up that profession and not that of bloody dictator otherwise, poor Ben Stein might not be with us much longer. And that would be a shame because not only is he funny, brilliant, talented and creative . . . he is right. And arguing against truth will not alter that fact that it is. Sorry Nietzsche.

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Study: Tyrannosaurus Rex Basically a Big Chicken (Foxnews, 080425)

[KH: how ridiculous!]

Tyrannosaurus rex just got a firm grip on the animal kingdom’s family tree, right next to chickens and ostriches.

New analyses of soft tissue from a T.rex leg bone re-confirm that birds are dinosaurs’ closest living relatives.

“We determined that T. rex, in fact, grouped with birds — ostrich and chicken — better than any other organism that we studied,” said researcher John Asara of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. “We also show that it groups better with birds than [with] modern reptiles, such as alligators and green anole lizards.”

Scientists long suspected non-avian dinosaurs were most closely related to modern-day birds. This idea initially rested largely on similarities between the outward appearances of bird and dinosaur skeletons.

Later, further evidence on the close evolutionary relationships among birds and non-avian dinosaurs accumulated.

A leg bone full of key gunk

The latest evidence comes from an ancient femur bone unearthed in 2003 by Jack Horner of the Museum of the Rockies in the Hell Creek Formation, a fossil-packed area that spans Montana, Wyoming and North and South Dakota.

It seems some 68 million years ago, a teenage T. rex died and left behind a drumstick-shaped femur bone that today still contains intact soft tissue and the oldest preserved proteins discovered to date.

Though no genetic material was preserved, researchers were able to extract the proteins from the collagen tissues.

“The proteins are what carry out the function inside the cells and organs. So the protein does a lot of the work. That [protein] sequence was derived from DNA,” Asara told LiveScience.

In the case of T. rex’s collagen, “it was responsible for making hard bone so that the dinosaur could stand.”

By comparing the dino’s protein sequences with those of 21 living organisms, a team of researchers say they have locked in the dinosaur-bird link.

Mastodons and K-T boundary addressed

The study, detailed in the April 25 issue of the journal Science, also shored up the evolutionary link between the extinct mastodon and the modern-day elephant.

A slew of advanced techniques — such as the protein sequencing — are shedding more light on the lives and deaths of now-extinct animals such as mastodons and dinosaurs.

For instance, another study published this week in Science pinned down more accurately the point in geologic time when dinosaurs, pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs and many plant and invertebrate animal species went extinct (as a result of what is called the K-T extinction event).

The new figure for that event is 65.95 million years ago, a few hundred thousand years later than previous estimates, says lead author Klaudia Kuiper of Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

The massive extinction event was likely the result of a meteor impact and/or volcanic activity on Earth that reduced sunlight and made photosynthesis very difficult for plants.

Reptiles, alligators, ostrich added

The current family-tree research builds on protein analyses of the T. rex bone by Asara and his colleagues, published last year in the journal Science.

“Now it’s gone a lot further,” Asara said. “We had no reptiles represented last year. We now have alligator and ostrich represented.”

The researchers also refined the family relationships using more sophisticated algorithms.

This current study was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Paul F. Glenn Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

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Ben Stein Exposes Richard Dawkins (Townhall.com, 080421)

By Dinesh D’Souza

In Ben Stein’s new film “Expelled,” there is a great scene where Richard Dawkins is going on about how evolution explains everything. This is part of Dawkins’ grand claim, which echoes through several of his books, that evolution by itself has refuted the argument from design. The argument from design hold that the design of the universe and of life are most likely the product of an intelligent designer. Dawkins thinks that Darwin has disproven this argument.

So Stein puts to Dawkins a simple question, “How did life begin?” One would think that this is a question that could be easily answered. Dawkins, however, frankly admits that he has no idea. One might expect Dawkins to invoke evolution as the all-purpose explanation. Evolution, however, only explains transitions from one life form to another. Evolution has no explanation for how life got started in the first place. Darwin was very clear about this.

In order for evolution to take place, there had to be a living cell. The difficulty for atheists is that even this original cell is a work of labyrinthine complexity. Franklin Harold writes in The Way of the Cell that even the simplest cells are more ingeniously complicated than man’s most elaborate inventions: the factory system or the computer. Moreover, Harold writes that the various components of the cell do not function like random widgets; rather, they work purposefully together, as if cooperating in a planned organized venture. Dawkins himself has described the cell as the kind of supercomputer, noting that it functions through an information system that resembles the software code.

Is it possible that living cells somehow assembled themselves from nonliving things by chance? The probabilities here are so infinitesimal that they approach zero. Moreover, the earth has been around for some 4.5 billion years and the first traces of life have already been found at some 3.5 billion years ago. This is just what we have discovered: it’s quite possible that life existed on earth even earlier. What this means is that, within the scope of evolutionary time, life appeared on earth very quickly after the earth itself was formed. Is it reasonable to posit that a chance combination of atoms and molecules, under those conditions, somehow generated a living thing? Could the random collision of molecules somehow produce a computer?

It is ridiculously implausible to think so. And the absurdity was recognized more than a decade ago by Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix. Yet Crick is a committed atheist. Unwilling to consider the possibility of divine or supernatural creation, Crick suggested that maybe aliens brought life to earth from another planet. And this is precisely the suggestion that Richard Dawkins makes in his response to Ben Stein. Perhaps, he notes, life was delivered to our planet by highly-evolved aliens. Let’s call this the “ET” explanation.

Stein brilliantly responds that he had no idea Richard Dawkins believes in intelligent design! And indeed Dawkins does seem to be saying that alien intelligence is responsible for life arriving on earth. What are we to make of this? Basically Dawkins is surrendering on the claim that evolution can account for the origins of life. It can’t. The issue now is simply whether a natural intelligence (ET) or a supernatural intelligence (God) created life. Dawkins can’t bear the supernatural explanation and so he opts for ET. But doesn’t it take as much, or more, faith to believe in extraterrestrial biology majors depositing life on earth than it does to believe in a transcendent creator?

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‘Expelled’ Correct on Darwin, Hitler Link, Says Christian Group (Christian Post, 080501)

In Ben Stein’s recent box office splash and pro-intelligent design documentary, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” links between Darwinism and the genocidal policies of Adolf Hitler are probed and explored. That link, according to Coral Ridge Ministries, has been historically proven time and time again.

In 2006, Coral Ridge Ministries, one of the largest Christian media ministries in the nation, produced its own documentary on the subject titled, “Darwin’s Deadly Legacy.”

Jerry Newcombe, co-producer of the film, said “Expelled” brought up a fresh examination of the facts – namely that Darwinism, and later, through its racially charged forms of social Darwinism advocating the extermination of “inferior” races, provided Hitler with the springs to launch the most horrific genocide known to man.

“The ideas of Charles Darwin helped fuel the Nazi killing machine, which took the lives of some 10-15 million people,” he said in a statement.

“Among German historians, there’s really not much debate about whether or not Hitler was a social Darwinist. He clearly was drawing on Darwinian ideas. It drove pretty much everything that he did. It was not just a peripheral part of his ideology,” commented Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler and a featured guest on the Coral Ridge Ministries’ television special.

Weikart added that Darwinism was extremely influential throughout German academia during the period and Hitler drew “on what many other scholars, biologists, and geneticists in Germany were preaching and teaching in the early twentieth century.”

Coral Ridge Ministries also cited the words of their late founder and host of “Darwin’s Deadly Legacy,” Dr. D. James Kennedy, to illustrate their point about the enduring connection between Hitler and Darwinism.

“We have had nearly 150 years of the theory of Darwinian evolution. And what has it brought us – whether Darwin intended it or not? Millions of deaths, the destruction of those deemed ‘inferior,’ the devaluing of human life, and increasing hopelessness. Darwin’s legacy has been deadly indeed,” Kennedy said in 2006.

“Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is a feature-length documentary film about researchers, professors, and academics who claim to have been marginalized, silenced, or threatened with academic expulsion because of their challenges to some or all parts of Darwin’s theory of evolution.

A major part of the film also explores and traces the roots of Darwinism, and its relation to the genocidal policies of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and the major tyrants of the 20th century.

Since its release on April 18, the film has generated over $5.6 million, placing it among the most successful documentary films of all time.

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Ben Stein Provokes the Liberal Wrath (townhall.com, 080505)

By Phyllis Schlafly

Ben Stein is known to many as an actor on Comedy Central. But the funniest part about his recent movie “Expelled” is not any clever lines spoken by Stein but the hysterical way liberals are trying to discourage people from seeing it.

Stein’s critics fail to effectively refute anything in “Expelled”; they just use epithets to ridicule it and hope they can make it go away. However, it won’t go away; even Scientific American, which labeled the movie “shameful,” concedes that it cannot be ignored.

The movie is about how scientists who dare to criticize Darwinism or discuss the contrary theory called intelligent design are expelled, fired, denied tenure, blacklisted, and bitterly denounced. Academic freedom doesn’t extend to this issue.

The message of Stein’s critics comes through loud and clear. They don’t want anybody to challenge Darwinian orthodoxy or suggest that intelligent design might be an explanation of the origin of life.

Stein, who serves as his own narrator in the movie, is very deadpan about it all. He doesn’t try to convince the audience that Darwinism is a fraud, or that God created the world, or even that some unidentified intelligent design might have started life on Earth.

Stein merely shows the intolerance of the universities, the government, the courts, the grant-making foundations and the media, and their determination to suppress any mention of intelligent design.

The only question posed by the movie is why, oh why, is there such a deliberate, consistent, widespread, vindictive effort to silence all criticism of dogmatic Darwinism or discussion of alternate theories of the origin of life? Stein interviews scientists who were blacklisted, denied grants and ostracized in the academic community because they dared to write or speak the forbidden words.

Liberals are particularly upset because the movie identifies Darwinism, rather than evolution, as the sacred word that must be isolated from criticism. But that semantic choice makes good sense because Darwinism is easily defined by Darwin’s own writings, whereas the word evolution is subject to different and even contrary definitions.

The truly funny part of the movie is Stein’s interview with Richard Dawkins, whose best-selling book “The God Delusion” (Mariner Books, $15.95) established this Englishman as the world’s premier atheist. Dawkins is a leading advocate of the theory that all life evolved from a single beginning in an ancient mud puddle, perhaps after being struck by lightning.

Putting aside the issue of evolving, how did life begin in the first place? Under Stein’s questioning, Dawkins finally said it is possible that life might have evolved on Earth after the arrival of a more highly developed being from another planet.

Aren’t aliens from outer space the stuff of science fiction? And how was the other-planet alien created? According to Dawkins, life must have just spontaneously evolved on another planet, of course without God.

Stein spent two years traveling the world to gather material for this movie. He interviewed scores of scientists and academics who say they were retaliated against because of questioning Darwin’s theories.

Stein interviewed Dr. Richard Sternberg, a biologist who lost his position at the prestigious Smithsonian Institution after he published a peer-reviewed article that mentioned intelligent design. Other academics who said they were victims of the anti-intelligent design campus police included astrobiologist Guillermo Gonzalez, denied tenure at Iowa State University, and Caroline Crocker, who lost her professorship at George Mason University.

Stein dares to include some filming at the death camps in Nazi Germany as a backdrop for interviews that explain Darwin’s considerable influence on Adolf Hitler and his well-known atrocities. The Darwin-Hitler connection was not a Stein discovery; Darwin’s influence on Hitler’s political worldview, and Hitler’s rejection of the sacredness of human life, is acknowledged in standard biographies of Hitler.

Stein also addresses how Darwin’s theories influenced one of the U.S.’s most embarrassing periods, the eugenics fad of the early 20th century. Thousands of Americans were legally sterilized as physically or mentally unfit.

Mandatory sterilization based on Darwin’s theories was even approved by the U.S. Supreme Court, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes writing his famous line, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Stein also reminds us that Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist who wanted to eliminate the races she believed were inferior.

Stein’s message is that the attack on freedom of inquiry is anti-science, anti-American, and anti-the whole concept of learning. His dramatization should force the public, and maybe even academia, to address this extraordinary intolerance of diversity.

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‘Expelled’ Filmmakers Claim ‘Over the Top’ Success (Christian Post, 080506)

“Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” the pro-intelligent design documentary featuring actor Ben Stein, made history this weekend as it skyrocketed into place as the 13th highest grossing documentary film of all time. Since its release on April 18, the film has earned an astounding $6.6 million while only in its 3rd week in the box office.

Despite opposition from critics such as Jeannette Catsoulis of the New York Times, who called the film a “conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry,” producers of the movie said that reaction to the film and its ideas questioning the tenets of Darwinism had generated an “over the top” reaction among moviegoers.

“We did exit polling on the first weekend and the exit polling done in six states with 1,100 people showed that 97% of the people who were polled said they liked the film,” said associate producer Mark Mathis, according to Baptist Press.

Even as the film continues to rake in record profits and defies expectations, however, producers of the film argue that those opposed to the film and its message continue to paint the film as a flop, unfairly comparing its performance to that of the high grossing documentaries by liberal filmmaker Michael Moore.

Michael Moore’s much hyped “Fahrenheit 9/11,” for example, enjoyed both millions of dollars of paid advertising and promotions in a market that was largely receptive to the film’s message of criticizing the Bush administration.

“Michael Moore comes out with a film and Michael Moore gets large amounts of time on morning shows – NBC, ABC, CBS, cable networks. He gets tens of millions of dollars of free publicity because Big Media see the world in general the way he does. Same thing with Al Gore’s film (An Inconvenient Truth),” Mathis noted.

“Expelled doesn’t get that, and not only does it not get that, but it gets the opposite – a massive panning,” he added.

Mathis also noted that the traditionally liberal and biased nature of Hollywood meant that comparing “Expelled” with a Michael Moore documentary was like comparing apples to oranges.

While liberal documentaries like “Sicko,” a documentary investigating the health care system, are ranked highly by critics, movies like “Expelled” are judged harshly, he noted.

“[Moore] has the tables set for him in a way that it’s not set for anybody else who comes at this stuff from a conservative side. Documentary film has been traditionally a liberal arena,” Mathis pointed out.

Ultimately, however, the biggest difference between a movie like “Expelled” and many of the liberal documentaries by Michael Moore, Mathis claimed, was that “Expelled” is primarily concerned with getting the facts to audiences without bias or prejudice.

“There is not anything in the film that you can point to and say, ‘This is dishonest. This is manipulation.’ You can disagree and say, ‘I think that drawing a connection between Darwinian ideas and Nazi ideas is not justified.’ ... People can disagree. But it’s not like some other documentaries. ... We didn’t just go out there and interview these people and say, ‘They say they were mistreated and that’s it.’ We were on campuses all over the place, interviewing different people and talking to different people.... Without exception, on every single campus it was acknowledged that the level of hostility toward Intelligent Design is palpable, that everybody knows about it,” he said.

Since its April 18 release, the film has attracted both praise and controversy in its challenge against Darwinism.

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It May Be 2008 at Home, But in the Academy It’s 1984 (townhall.com, 080512)

By Ken Connor

Freedom of speech and inquiry have long been cherished principles in America. They are especially important in the world of academia where they have been viewed as the basis of “academic freedom.” For years scholars have advanced the proposition that academic freedom is essential to the advancement of knowledge. Only by challenging the prevailing orthodoxy, they maintained, could one open up new vistas of learning and truth.

In our postmodern world, however, many scholars are learning the hard way that “academic freedom” has become an Orwellian term meaning “academic tyranny.” Today, in the academy, one is free only to advance notions that are consonant with the prevailing politically correct orthodoxy. Challenges to that orthodoxy are often met with denials of tenure, refusals to renew contracts, or expulsion.

Nowhere is this more evident than when the notion of Darwinian Evolution is questioned. And nowhere are the limitations of academic freedom more in evidence than in the debate over Intelligent Design. In his documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Ben Stein chronicles the fate of scholars who dared to proffer the theory of Intelligent Design (ID) as an explanation for the origin of life. Their efforts were rebuffed with Gestapo-like tactics carried out by the politically correct police who brooked no challenges to Charles Darwin’s theories. The heterodox were deemed unworthy of membership in the academy and were expelled. Tenure was denied and their contracts were not renewed. Challenges to the existing “academic consensus” are simply not allowed. Thus, a scholar’s freedom of inquiry has been transmogrified to freedom from inquiry.

History is replete, however, with great advances made by scholars who challenged the existing “academic consensus.” Names like Galileo and Kepler and Einstein come to mind. Progress, after all, often requires thinking outside the box.

Stein’s documentary contains interviews with some of the world’s leading atheists who are also proponents of Darwin’s theories. Of course, they do not acknowledge Darwinism to be merely a theory; to them it is settled science. Yet their notions of the origin of life can hardly be called “scientific.” Michael Ruse posits in the film that life on earth evolved on the backs of crystals and Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, hypothesizes that life was planted on earth through space aliens. Men such as these are deemed “leading lights” in the academic community, but Stein’s cross-examination makes them appear to be rather “dim bulbs.” Intelligent Design seems eminently plausible compared to the ravings of these scientists who appear educated beyond their intelligence.

In Expelled, Ben Stein also interviews Dr. Eugenie C. Scott, a spokeswoman for the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). The NCSE’s mission is “defending the teaching of evolution in the public schools,” and Dr. Scott is the self-appointed Chief of the Politically Correct Thought Police. Although a putative proponent of academic freedom, she maintains that there is no room for discussion of Intelligent Design in the classroom. She comes across as Darwin’s Eva Braun in the film.

Instead of encouraging free inquiry, the scientists interviewed in the documentary mock ID as “pseudo-science” or “religion masquerading as science.” These barbs are based on their assumption that the notion that God (or a designer) created life somehow contradicts rational thought. They argue that ID is based on belief—not rational science—but they neglect to mention that their theories on the origin of life are also based on an element of belief. Indeed, the acceptance of any theory of origins necessitates belief (or faith) in that theory.

The NCSE’s dogmatic dismissal of alternative theories of our origin in an attempt to preserve “science standards” smacks of the censorship Galileo suffered at the hands of the Church when he defended the theory that the Sun, not the Earth, was at the center of our solar system. Perhaps most telling is Dr. Scott’s claim that the NCSE will not rest until the last brushfires of controversy over evolution are put out. These efforts to extinguish controversy and to mute dissenting voices are antithetical to traditional notions of academic freedom. But that doesn’t bother the scholars who are interviewed in the film. In the academy, it’s 1984 and, in their world, freedom is tyranny.

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UC Berkeley Staff Face Lawsuit Over Pro-Evolution Bias (Christian Post, 080414)

Staff members at the University of California-Berkeley are being sued in court over a pro-evolution Web site, hosted by the school’s science program, that ridicules religious denominations that do not agree with evolution.

The Pacific Justice Institute, a religious liberties group, claims that the Web site – which was designed with $500,000 in federal backing – endorses religious views that support evolution while deriding those that do not, thus constituting an illegal and public endorsement of religion by the university.

The group also points to parts of the site that feature pro-evolution religious denominations alongside faiths that the site says adhere to creationism and “explicitly contradict science.”

In another section on the Web site, teachers are informed to consider all objections by students to evolution as “different from legitimate inquiry” and “disrupt[ions]” to the learning process.

“Whatever one’s views on the origin of life or the theory of evolution, it is completely inappropriate for the government to declare that some religious denominations are better than others,” explained PJI Chief Counsel Kevin Snider, in a statement. “The Supreme Court has long held that government must not decree what is orthodox in religion, and we are seeking to hold UC Berkeley to that standard.”

Roy Caldwell, who is among the professors being sued by PJI, denied the assertion, arguing that the site simply made “facts” available to users.

“Basically, what we have is a page that deals with the misconceptions and challenges to the teaching of evolution, and we provided resources to teachers to answer them,” he told UC Berkeley news. “One of those questions is, ‘Aren’t religion and evolution incompatible?’ And we say, ‘no,’ and point to a number of sites by clerics and others who make that point.”

PJI President Brad Davis emphasized that the case was a clear situation of viewpoint discrimination.

“Government actions that demean a group’s faith clearly express state hostility toward religion and must be contested,” he said.

The lawsuit, which was originally filed by PJI in 2005 and dismissed because of what judges said was a “lack in standing,” will be reviewed this week by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

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Survey: 16% of Science Teachers are Creationists (Christian Post, 080522)

16% of all U.S. science teachers are creationists, according to a recent national survey.

In one of the most authoritative studies ever carried out, the results revealed that creationism – despite being challenged and dismissed by courts as an unconstitutional endorsement of religion – continues to be a staple in many science classrooms.

Michael Berkman, a political scientist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park and who conducted the survey with a group of colleagues, said that teachers, ultimately, held the final word when it comes to what is taught in the classroom.

“Ultimately, they are the ones who carry it out,” Berkman explained to ABC News.

While a majority of the nearly 1,000 teachers surveyed in the poll said that they spent at least three to 10 hours of classroom hours covering evolution, a quarter of all teachers also said they covered creationism and intelligent design – about half of whom said that they believed it was a “valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species.”

2% of all teachers said evolution was not covered at all in their classrooms.

An examination of the survey results also revealed that 16% of all U.S. science teachers said they believed God had created human beings and the earth within the last 10,000 years.

The release of the recent survey results comes at a time when evolution has been increasingly scrutinized, challenged, and debated throughout many schools.

Many public school teachers and students who share views contradicting or challenging the tenets of Darwinism in the classroom claim they have been marginalized, discriminated, or ostracized.

In response, Louisiana, Missouri, Alabama, and Michigan have been prompted to pass a series of “Academic Freedom” bills.

Lawmakers say that the bills would guarantee the freedom of teachers and students to examine and challenge the tenets of Darwinism in classrooms without fear of reprisal.

“What these bills seek to do is to restore Charles Darwin’s approach to teaching evolution – to teach it in a balanced, objective fashion,” explained Casey Luskin, an attorney with the pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute, in a statement.

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Evolutionists Fear Academic Freedom (townhall.com, 080705)

By Floyd and Mary Beth Brown

Celebrate the courage of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal in the fight for freedom. He has shown tremendous courage in signing the Louisiana Science Education Bill, an important blow for academic freedom.

“Our freedom to think and consider more than one option is part of what has given America her competitive edge in the international marketplace of ideas,” said biology scientist Caroline Crocker to the Louisiana House Committee on Education. “The current denial of academic freedom rights for those who are judged politically incorrect may put this in jeopardy.”

Crocker was testifying on the bill allowing supplemental materials into Louisiana public school science classrooms about evolution, cloning, global warming and other debatable topics. The legislature went on to unanimously (35-0) pass the bill. Now it has become law because of Gov. Jindal’s courage.

One would think legislation which allows an environment that promotes “critical thinking” and “objective discussion” in the classroom would please everyone — it did the bipartisan group of legislators in Louisiana — but such is not the case. The New York Times felt threatened by the legislation, calling it “retrograde,” naming its editorial on the topic, “Louisiana’s Latest Assault on Darwin.” They were attempting to pressure Gov. Jindal to not sign the law, using a number of tactics including implicit ridicule, subtle belittling insults and untruths.

The law is straightforward and clearly restricts any intent to promote a religious doctrine. There is no mention of either intelligent design or creationism. Darwinism is not banned and teachers are required to teach students from standard textbooks. But the Times calls the legislation a “Trojan horse” because the state board of education must, upon request of local school districts, help foster an environment of “critical thinking” and “open discussion” on controversial scientific subjects. This allows teachers to use supplemental materials to analyze evolution and show views other than Darwin’s theory. It allows evolution to be criticized, and the law protects the rights of teachers and students to talk freely about a wide range of ideas without fear of reprisal.

The Times’ fear is that objective discussion “would have the pernicious effect of implying that evolution is only weakly supported and that there are valid competing scientific theories when there are not.” They called any school district “foolish” if they “head down this path.”

Evolutionists use a variety of methods to silence alternate viewpoints. They say people are trying to “inject religious views into science courses.” Besides calling it a “retrograde step”, the Times used implicit ridicule of Governor Jindal, saying, “As a biology major at Brown University, Mr. Jindal must know that evolution is the unchallenged central organizing principle for modern biology.”

Many reputable scientists and scholars disagree with Darwin’s theory of evolution and certainly challenge it. Evolutionists say they don’t want biased religious views forced on students. Ironically, Darwin’s evolutionary theory is based is atheistic naturalism, a religious belief.

Dr. William Provine of Cornell University explained his and Darwin’s shared atheistic beliefs in this way: “Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear — and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal — directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end of me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either. What an unintelligible idea.”

Scientist Casey Luskin, a scholar with the Discovery Institute said, “We would like to see evolution taught in an unbiased fashion and also want students to learn how to think like scientists and to weigh the evidence for and against.”

Academic free speech rights for Louisiana’s public school students and teachers are now guaranteed because of Gov. Bobby Jindal’s signature. Trying to strike a modicum of balance to the scientific discussion in classrooms and allow students to hear more than one view, Gov. Jindal acted wisely.

Other states are considering similar legislation. Students deserve academic free speech rights to hear alternate views, ask critical questions and debate controversial topics. This freedom will in turn strengthen our country.

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Professor Dismayed over Christians Rejecting Evolution (Christian Post, 080917)

VATICAN CITY - A professor at a Vatican-sponsored university expressed dismay Tuesday that some Christian groups reject the theory of evolution — implicitly criticizing the literal interpretation of the Bible.

Further emphasizing the official Catholic stance, a Vatican official restated the Church position that evolution is not incompatible with faith.

Both men spoke at a press conference ahead of a March event aimed at fostering dialogue between religion and science, and appraising evolution 150 years after Charles Darwin’s landmark “On the Origin of Species.”

The forum is being organized by Rome’s prestigious Gregorian Pontifical University, which is highly influential in Vatican circles, and by the University of Notre Dame in the U.S. state of Indiana.

Popes going back to the mid-20th century have “recognized the scientific value of the theory of biological evolution,” Gennaro Auletta, who teaches philosophy of science at the Gregorian, told reporters. “Greater understanding and assimilation of such subject matter by clergy and faithful has been hoped for.”

“I would like to point out that unfortunately one cannot say that about the faithful of all Christian confessions, as media reports indicate,” Auletta said.

Auletta appeared to be referring to stories about fundamentalist churches that maintain a literal interpretation of the Bible, including the belief that the world was created in six days.

Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi told reporters that: “One thing is sure. Evolution is not incompatible with faith.”

“Creationism from a strictly theological view makes sense, but when it is used in scientific fields it becomes useless,” Ravasi said.

Quoting the late Pope John Paul II, Ravasi said that “evolution can no longer be considered a hypothesis.”

Pope Benedict XVI warned last week against fundamentalists’ literal interpretations of the Bible. The pontiff told a gathering of intellectuals and academics in Paris that the structure of the Bible “excludes by its nature everything that today is known as fundamentalism. In effect, the word of God can never simply be equated with the letter of the text,” Benedict said.

Benedict, in a book published last year, praised scientific progress, but cautioned that evolution raises philosophical questions that science alone cannot answer. In the book, he stopped short of endorsing what is known as “intelligent design.”

Intelligent design proponents believe that living organisms are so complex they must have been created by a higher force, rather than evolving from more primitive forms.

Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, an influential cardinal considered close to Benedict, has condemned a U.S. federal court decision that barred a Pennsylvania school district from teaching intelligent design in biology class.

Schoenborn has said he wants to correct what he says is a widespread misconception that the Catholic Church has given blanket endorsement to Darwin’s theories.

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Over 800 Scientists Stand Against Language Critical of Evolution (Christian Post, 081001)

Over 800 scientists in Texas have signed a statement to “encourage valid critical thinking and scientific reasoning by leaving out all references to ‘strengths and weaknesses’” of evolution – references, they say, that politicians “have used to introduce supernatural explanations into science courses.”

“Texas public schools should be preparing our kids to succeed in the 21st century, not promoting political and ideological agendas that are hostile to a sound science education,” said David Hillis, a professor of integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin, according to The Associated Press.

Hills is one of the state’s more than 400 science faculty members who have signed the “Scientists for a Responsible Curriculum in Texas Public Schools” statement, which also includes more than 430 signatures from other Texas scientists.

“We simply believe that students deserve the best science education in their Texas classrooms,” explains the 21st Century Science Coalition, which is spearheading the signature campaign.

At the heart of the matter are the current standards for the state’s science curriculum, under which students are expected to “analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information.”

Some of the Texas Board of Education’s committee members have asked the board to remove the “strengths and weaknesses” phrase as the board looked to update state science standards this summer.

Among those requesting the board to drop the phrase is Kevin Fisher, a committee member who told the NY Times that questions left unanswered by evolution should not be regarded as its weaknesses.

Other critics include Texas Freedom Network, a group that has opposed state proposals for Bible classes and Bible textbooks in the past and is currently spearheading the “Stand Up for Science” campaign.

“It’s time for state board members to listen to classroom teachers and true experts instead of promoting their own personal agendas,” expressed TFN president Kathy Miller in a statement. “Our students can’t succeed with a 19th-century science education in their 21st-century classrooms. We applaud the science work groups for recognizing that fact.”

While there has been strong opposition against the standards’ current language, several board members have appeared to favor it, saying it maintains a balanced debate on evolution.

“Evolution is not fact. Evolution is a theory and, as such, cannot be proven,” Board Vice Chairman David Bradley told The Houston Chronicle earlier this summer. “Students need to be able to jump to their own conclusions.”

Bradley also dismissed concerns by critics over the board’s intention to sneak religion into the classroom.

“The only thing that this board is going to do is ask for accuracy.”

Barbara Cargill, the vice chair of the board’s Committee on Instruction, said giving students the freedom to discuss both sides of evolution will ensure them a “well-rounded education.”

“It prompts them to be critical thinkers, and it also helps them to respect the opinions of other students even if they disagree,” she told the Chronicle.

Meanwhile, Discovery Institute, an intelligent design think tank, has rejected allegations that the group is using the “strength and weaknesses” rhetoric as a new strategy in pushing intelligent design in schools following the 2005 Dover case – when intelligent design was barred from being taught in Pennsylvania’s Middle District public school science classrooms.

On the organization’s blog site, staff member Robert Crowther pointed out that the “strengths and weaknesses” language was adopted by the Texas Board of Education over a decade ago, long before the Dover case, and that debate over it has been going on across the nation since then.

While the Discovery Institute has not yet issued comments regarding the current progress of the scientist signature campaign, Anika Smith, editor of the organization’s Evolution News & Views blog, has voiced her disapproval of the media’s coverage, singling out a recent AP article that gave no explanation for the signatories’ opposition to current language “except the unsupported claim that thoroughly examining Darwin’s theory in the classroom is something only creationists do.”

“Actually, AP reporter Kelley Shannon is pretty sure that the whole thing is a creationist ploy to teach religion in our schools,” Smith wrote Wednesday.

The State Board of Education will begin discussing the proposed new standards this fall and have tentatively set a deadline of March 2009 for final adoption. Publishers use the state’s curriculum standards to create new science textbooks. The state is scheduled to adopt new science textbooks in 2011.

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Scientist Coalition Accused of ‘Suppressing’ Evidence Against Darwinism (Christian Post, 081008)

While the 21st Century Science Coalition may sound like it’s on the cutting edge of scientific innovation, at least one of its critics argues otherwise.

“The 21st Century Science Coalition has the wrong name,” says Dr. John G. West, Vice President for Public Policy and Legal Affairs at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.

“It should be dubbed the ‘19th Century Science Coalition,’ because it wants to turn the clock back to the 19th century by suppressing recent scientific evidence challenging Darwinism from fields like biochemistry, bioinformatics, microbiology, and paleontology,” he told The Christian Post in response to the coalition’s recruitment of more than 800 supporters from the scientific community in Texas.

Last week, the 21st Century Science Coalition warned the State Board of Education not to inject politics or religion into new science guidelines for public schools, worried that social conservatives on the 15-member board will insist that public schools teach the “weaknesses of evolution.” The board plans to adopt new science curriculum standards next year.

Under the current standards for the state’s science curriculum, students are expected to “analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information.”

The 21st Century Science Coalition alleges, however, that the references to “strengths and weaknesses” have been used by politicians “to introduce supernatural explanations into science courses.”

Such explanations include concepts like Intelligent Design, which holds that some aspects of nature are so complex that they could not have come about randomly but point to an intelligent designer.

To date, over 800 scientists in Texas have signed the coalition’s statement to “encourage valid critical thinking and scientific reasoning by leaving out all references to ‘strengths and weaknesses.’”

“A strong science curriculum is an essential part of a 21st-century education and should be based on established peer-reviewed empirical research,” states the introduction to the statement titled “Scientists for a Responsible Curriculum in Texas Public Schools.”

In addition to asserting that scientifically sound curriculum standards must “make clear that evolution is an easily observable phenomenon that has been documented beyond any reasonable doubt,” supporters of the statement say standards must “recognize that all students are best served when matters of faith are left to families and houses of worship.”

West, however, insists that no one is proposing to teach religion in biology classes in Texas.

“The claim about religion is simply a smoke screen to cover up the effort by Darwinists to impose an ideological litmus test on science education in Texas,” he said.

“What [backers of the current curriculum] want is for students to hear about the scientific (not religious) evidence for and against Darwinism.”

Furthermore, West says Darwinists are the ones who are truly trying to undermine good science education by turning it into a form of indoctrination.

“Examining the strengths and weaknesses of scientific explanations and theories is a critical part of good science education,” he insisted. “Science educators disserve students if they fail to introduce them to all of the relevant scientific evidence and help them critically analyze that evidence.”

According to reports, the State Board of Education will begin discussing the proposed new standards this fall and have tentatively set a deadline of March 2009 for final adoption. In 2011, the state is scheduled to adopt new science textbooks, which are created by publishers using the state’s curriculum standards.

In addition to the 21st Century Science Coalition, other critics of the current curriculum include Texas Freedom Network, a group that has opposed state proposals for Bible classes and Bible textbooks in the past. The network is currently spearheading the “Stand Up for Science” campaign, which accuses creationists on the State Board of Education of “working to undermine instruction on evolution in science classes.”

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Biola to Feature Leading Christian Apologist, ‘Godfather’ of Intelligent Design (Christian Post, 081219)

Biola University will conclude its centennial year Friday with a fall commencement that will feature renowned apologist Lee Strobel and the “godfather” of the Intelligent Design movement, retired UC Berkeley professor Philip E. Johnson.

According to the La Miranda, Calif.-based biblical institution, Strobel will serve as the keynote speaker while Johnson will be awarded with an Honorary Doctor of Laws for distinction in public service.

“Strobel’s like-mindedness to Biola’s mission of impacting the world made him an excellent choice as the keynote speaker for this fall’s commencement,” expressed the university in a statement Wednesday.

Once an atheist, Strobel is today one of the evangelical community’s most popular apologists as well as a New York Times best-selling author of nearly 20 award-winning books. His ministry experience has included serving as a teaching pastor at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., and at Saddleback Valley Community Church in Lake Forest, Calif.

“Strobel encourages Christians to be culturally relevant,” Biola noted.

Johnson, meanwhile, is best known as one of the founders of the intelligent design movement, which asserts that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.”

The idea of intelligent design, which critics view as a variation of creationism, has led to heated debates, a number of court battles, and the dismissal of several highly respected professors. It was also a key part in the highly successful documentary “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” which featured actor Ben Stein.

According to Biola, Johnson will be awarded for having “a clear evangelical Christian testimony” and having demonstrated “significant service and achievement over an extended period of time, which is national or international in nature” and is relevant to the mission of the university.

Starting from 2 p.m., Biola University President Barry H. Corey will confer degrees upon 121 graduate students, and 95 students who completed Biola’s adult-degree-learning program, BOLD. At the 7 p.m. ceremony, 196 undergraduates will be conferred degrees.

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Hundreds of Complaints Force Zoo to Break Ties with Creation Museum (Christian Post, 081203)

A high volume of complaints have forced the Cincinnati Zoo to pull out of a special business partnership with the Creation Museum in nearby Petersburg, Ky., after running for less than three days.

The two institutions had come together to offer a special ticket package that gave visitors the opportunity to drop in on both at a discounted rate while promoting one another at the same time.

According to the Creation Museum’s founder, Ken Ham, however, the zoo received hundreds of complaints, many of which were opposed to the faith and ideas that the museum presents.

“It’s a pity that intolerant people have pushed for our expulsion simply because of our Christian faith,” Ham said, expressing disappointment in the zoo’s decision but also understanding of its perspective.

“Some of their comments on blogs reveal great intolerance for anything having to do with Christianity,” he added.

The Creation Museum, which cost $27 million to build, is a 60,000-square foot facility that opened last year in May and revived the creation/evolution debate among Young Earth creationists, Old Earth creationists, anti-creationism evolutionists, and theistic evolutionists.

Packed with high-tech exhibits that include animatronic dinosaurs and a huge wooden ark, the museum attempts to align the Bible’s literal account of creation with natural history. The museum’s founder, like many other Young Earth creationists, believes dinosaurs appeared on the same day God created other land animals.

Critics, however, both non-Christians and Christians who are against a literal interpretation of the Bible on life origins, have protested and spoke out against the anti-evolution display, worried that their children will be affected. The controversy garnered the new exhibit a large amount of media coverage.

“Frankly, we are used to this kind of criticism from our opponents,” Ham said regarding the latest controversy, “and so being ‘expelled’ like this is not a huge surprise.”

Despite the zoo’s decision, Ham said his museum would continue promoting the “excellent zoo” on its website and in printed material that is passed out inside of the museum.

“We are committed to promoting regional tourism,” he explained.

Furthermore, the museum will still provide $9 off of the ticket prices (the amount of the discount under the original agreement) from Dec. 2 to Dec. 11, with the exception of Saturday, Dec. 6. “Get the Museum/Zoo Discount Anyway,” the museum website says.

Beginning on Dec. 12, the museum will have up its special Christmas display, which includes a live outdoor nativity scene and a special lighted “Road to Bethlehem” trail. Visitors to the museum grounds will also be met with hayrides, seasonal lights and decorations, holiday food, and events and activities for children. Inside the museum, there will be special Christmas exhibits including the Planetarium presentation “The Bethlehem Star.”

“We find the two – Creation and Christmas – go very well together,” says Creation Museum co-founder and spokesperson Mark Looy, “and we invite our guests to experience each in light of the other at our special ‘Bethlehem’s Blessings – A Christmas Celebration’ this December.”

Located near the Cincinnati Airport, the Creation Museum is a ministry of Answers in Genesis, a nonprofit Christian organization dedicated to confirming the validity of the Bible from the very first verse.

Since its opening in May 2007, the museum has seen over 600,000 visitors.

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Life As We Know It Nearly Created in Lab (Foxnews, 090113)

One of life’s greatest mysteries is how it began. Scientists have pinned it down to roughly this:

Some chemical reactions occurred about 4 billion years ago — perhaps in a primordial tidal soup or maybe with help of volcanoes or possibly at the bottom of the sea or between the mica sheets — to create biology.

Now scientists have created something in the lab that is tantalizingly close to what might have happened.

It’s not life, they stress, but it certainly gives the science community a whole new data set to chew on.

The researchers, at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., created molecules that self-replicate and even evolve and compete to win or lose. If that sounds exactly like life, read on to learn the controversial and thin distinction.

Know your RNA

To understand the remarkable breakthrough, detailed Jan. 8 in the early online edition of the journal Science, you have to know a little about molecules called RNA and DNA.

DNA is the software of life, the molecules that pack all the genetic information of a cell. DNA and the genes within it are where mutations occur, enabling changes that create new species.

RNA is the close cousin to DNA. More accurately, RNA is thought to be a primitive ancestor of DNA.

RNA can’t run a life form on its own, but 4 billion years ago it might have been on the verge of creating life, just needing some chemical fix to make the leap.

In today’s world, RNA is dependent on DNA for performing its roles, which include coding for proteins.

If RNA is in fact the ancestor to DNA, then scientists have figured they could get RNA to replicate itself in a lab without the help of any proteins or other cellular machinery. Easy to say, hard to do.

But that’s exactly what the Scripps researchers did. Then things went surprisingly further.

‘Immortalized’

Specifically, the researchers synthesized RNA enzymes that can replicate themselves without the help of any proteins or other cellular components, and the process proceeds indefinitely.

“Immortalized” RNA, they call it, at least within the limited conditions of a laboratory.

More significantly, the scientists then mixed different RNA enzymes that had replicated, along with some of the raw material they were working with, and let them compete in what’s sure to be the next big hit: “Survivor: Test Tube.”

Remarkably, they bred.

And now and then, one of these survivors would screw up, binding with some other bit of raw material it hadn’t been using. Hmm. That’s exactly what life forms do ...

When these mutations occurred, “the resulting recombinant enzymes also were capable of sustained replication, with the most fit replicators growing in number to dominate the mixture,” the scientists report.

The “creatures” — wait, we can’t call them that! — evolved, with some “species” winning out.

“It kind of blew me away,” said team member Tracey Lincoln of the Scripps Research Institute, who is working on her Ph.D. “What we have is non-living, but we’ve been able to show that it has some life-like properties, and that was extremely interesting.”

Indeed.

Knocking on life’s door

Lincoln’s advisor, professor Gerald Joyce, reiterated that while the self-replicating RNA enzyme systems share certain characteristics of life, they are not life as we know it.

“What we’ve found could be relevant to how life begins, at that key moment when Darwinian evolution starts,” Joyce said in a statement.

Joyce’s restraint, clear also on an NPR report of the finding, has to be appreciated. He allows that some scientists familiar with the work have argued that this is life.

Another scientist said that what the researchers did is equivalent to recreating a scenario that might have led to the origin of life.

Joyce insists he and Lincoln have not created life: “We’re knocking on that door,” he says, “but of course we haven’t achieved that.”

Only when a system is developed in the lab that has the capability of evolving novel functions on its own can it be properly called life, Joyce said. In short, the molecules in Joyce’s lab can’t evolve any totally new tricks, he said.

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‘Missing Links’ Reveal Truth About Evolution (Foxnews, 090212)

[KH: a speculatory piece, no real proof]

Ted Daeschler

With the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin this week, people around the world are celebrating his role as the father of evolutionary theory.

Events and press releases are geared, in part, to combat false claims made by some who would discredit the theory.

One frequently cited “hole” in the theory: Creationists claim there are no transitional fossils, aka “missing links.”

Biologists and paleontologists, among others, know this claim is false.

As key evidence for evolution and species’ gradual change over time, transitional creatures should resemble intermediate species, having skeletal and other body features in common with two distinct groups of animals, such as reptiles and mammals, or fish and amphibians.

These animals sound wild, but the fossil record — which is far from complete — is full of them nonetheless, as documented by Occidental College geologist Donald Prothero in his book “Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters” (Columbia University Press, 2007).

Prothero discussed those fossils last month at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, along with transitional fossils that were announced since the book was published, including the “fishibian” and the “frogamander.”

At least hundreds, possibly thousands, of transitional fossils have been found so far by researchers. The exact count is unclear because some lineages of organisms are continuously evolving.

Here is a short list of transitional fossils documented by Prothero and that add to the mountain of evidence for Charles Darwin’s theory.

A lot of us relate most to fossils of life closely related to humans, so the list focuses on mammals and other vertebrates, including dinosaurs.

Mammals, including us

— It is now clear that the evolutionary tree for early and modern humans looks more like a bush than the line represented in cartoons.

All the hominid fossils found to date form a complex nexus of specimens, Prothero says, but Sahelanthropus tchadensis, found in 2001 and 2002, threw everyone for a loop because it walked upright 7 million years ago on two feet but is quite chimp-like in its skull size, teeth, brow ridges and face.

It could be a common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, but many paleoanthropologists will remain unsure until more fossils are found. Previously, the earliest ancestor of our Homo genus found in the fossil record dated back 6 million years.

— Most fossil giraffes have short necks and today’s have long necks, but anatomist Nikos Solounias of the New York Institute of Technology’s New York College of Osteopathic Medicine is preparing a description of a giraffe fossil, Bohlinia, with a neck that is intermediate in length.

— Manatees, also called sea cows, are marine mammals that have flippers and a down-turned snout for grazing in warm shallow waters.

In 2001, scientists discovered the fossil of a “walking manatee,” Pezosiren portelli, which had feet rather than flippers and walked on land during the Eocene epoch (54.8 million years ago to 33.7 million years ago) in what is now Jamaica.

Along with skull features like manatees (such as horizontal tooth replacement, like a conveyor belt), it also had heavy ribs for ballast, showing that it also had an aquatic lifestyle, like hippos.

— Scientists know that mastodons, mammoths and elephants all share a common ancestor, but it gets hard to tell apart some of the earliest members of this group, called proboscideans, going back to fossils from the Oligocene epoch (33.7 million years ago to 23.8 million years ago).

The primitive members of this group can be traced back to what Prothero calls “the ultimate transitional fossil,” Moeritherium, from the late Eocene of Egypt.

It looked more like a small hippo than an elephant and probably lacked a long trunk, but it had short upper and lower tusks, the teeth of a primitive mastodon and ear features found only in other proboscideans.

— The Dimetrodon was a big predatory reptile with a tail and a large sail or fin-back. It is often mistaken for a dinosaur, but it’s actually part of our mammalian lineage and more closely related to mammals than reptiles, which is seen in its specialized teeth for stabbing meat and skull features that only mammals and their ancestors had. It probably moved around like a lizard and had a jawbone made of multiple bones, like a reptile.

Dinosaurs and birds

— The classic fossil of Archaeopteryx, sometimes called the first bird, has a wishbone (fully fused clavicle) which is only found in modern birds and some dinosaurs. But it also shows impressions from feathers on its body, as seen on many of the theropod dinosaurs from which it evolved.

Its body, capable of flight or gliding, also had many of dinosaur features — teeth (no birds alive today have teeth), a long bony tail (tails on modern birds are entirely feathers, not bony), long hind legs and toes, and a specialized hand with long bony fingers (unlike modern bird wings in which the fingers are fused into a single element), Prothero said.

— Sinornis was a bird that also has long bony fingers and teeth, like those seen in dinosaurs and not seen in modern birds.

— Yinlong is a small bipedal dinosaur which shares features with two groups of dinosaurs known to many kids — ceratopsians, the beaked dinosaurs like Triceratops, and pachycephalosaurs, known for having a thick dome of bone in their skulls protecting their brains. Yinlong has the thick rostral bone that is otherwise unique to ceratopsians dinosaurs, and the thick skull roof found in the pachycephalosaurs.

— Anchisaurus is a primitive sauropod dinosaur that has a lot of lizard-like features. It was only 8 feet long (the classic sauropods later on could be more than 100-feet long), had a short neck (sauropods are known for their long necks, while lizards are not), and delicate limbs and feet, unlike dinosaurs. Its spine was like that of a sauropod.

The early sauropods were bipedal, while the latter were stood on all fours. Anchisaurus was probably capable of both stances, Prothero wrote.

Fish, frogs, reptiles

— Tiktaalik, aka the fishibian or the fishapod, is a large scaled fish that shows a perfect transition between fins and feet, aquatic and land animals.

It had fish-like scales, as well as fish-like fin rays and jaw and mouth elements, but it had a shortened skull roof and mobile neck to catch prey, an ear that could hear in both land and water, and a wrist joint that is like those seen in land animals.

— Last year, scientists announced the discovery of Gerobatrachus hottorni, aka the frogamander. Technically, it’s a toothed amphibian, but it shows the common origins of frogs and salamanders, scientists say, with a wide skull and large ear drum (like frogs) and two fused ankle bones as seen in salamanders.

— A turtle on the way to becoming a turtle, Odontochelys semistestacea, swam around in China’s coastal waters 200 million years ago. It had a belly shell, but its back was basically bare of armor. Odontochelys had an elongated, pointed snout. Most modern turtles have short snouts.

In addition, the roof of its mouth, along with the upper and lower jaws, was equipped with teeth, which the researchers said is a primitive feature for turtles whose mugs are now tipped with beaks but contain no teeth.

==============================

Darwin’s Birthday Poll: Fewer Than 4 in 10 Believe in Evolution (Foxnews, 090212)

A new poll released just in time for Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday found that only 39% of Americans say they “believe in the theory of evolution,” and just 24% of those who attend church weekly believe in that explanation for the development of life on Earth.

The Gallup survey, released Wednesday, found a quarter of those polled do not believe in evolution, and 36% said they don’t have an opinion either way.

Another survey by the Pew Research Center got similar results.

The Gallup poll of 1,018 American adults found strong ties between education level and belief in the theory of evolution.

“Among those with high-school educations or less who have an opinion on Darwin’s theory, more say they do not believe in evolution than say they believe in it,” Gallup found. “For all other groups, and in particular those who have at least a college degree, belief is significantly higher than nonbelief.”

Just 21% of respondents who had up to a high school level of education believe in evolution, compared with 74% of those with postgraduate degrees.

Frank Newport, Gallup’s editor-in-chief, wrote that attitudes were shaped to an even greater degree by religion.

“Previous Gallup research shows that the rate of church attendance is fairly constant across educational groups, suggesting that this relationship is not owing to an underlying educational difference but instead reflects a direct influence of religious beliefs on belief in evolution,” he said.

Among weekly churchgoers, only 24% said they believe in evolution, while 41% do not and 35% have no opinion.

Inversely, 55% of those who seldom or never attend church expressed belief in evolution, while 11% do not, and 34% have no opinion.

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Churches Mark 200th Anniversary of Darwin’s Birth (Christian Post, 090212)

[KH: awful!]

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution may have been a difficult pill for the Church to swallow over the years but with the 200th anniversary of the naturalist’s birth on Thursday, churches today are celebrating his contribution to science and understanding God’s creation.

“Christians believe that God created the world. Charles Darwin gave the first successful scientific account of one important part of God’s creation: how life developed from the simplest of forms into the extraordinary variety that we see around us,” said the Rev. Dr. Philip Luscombe, Principal of Wesley House, Cambridge, and president of the Cambridge Theological Federation.

“In doing so, Darwin ruled out some of the ways in which many had assumed that God worked. But as he himself was clear, nothing that he wrote affected the majesty of God in creation.”

The Rev. Jenny Ellis, Spirituality and Discipleship Officer at the Methodist Church, said that Darwin’s scientific theory of the mechanics of creation allowed people to appreciate the “faith truth” of the biblical stories and the “precious value and giftedness of God-inspired creation.”

“The stories convey the sense of the wonder and goodness of creation; of the creative, divine Spirit who brings it into being and sustains it; of creation’s deep inter-connectedness, its rhythm and balance,” she said.

Their comments come as prominent scientists and leading religious figures published a letter in The Daily Telegraph calling for an end to the fight over Darwin’s theory.

“Evolution, we believe, has become caught in the crossfire of a religious battle in which Darwin himself had little personal interest,” wrote the signatories, which included two Church of England bishops, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain and a member of the Evangelical Alliance.

“We respectfully encourage those who reject evolution to weigh the now overwhelming evidence, hugely strengthened by recent advances in genetics, which testifies to the theory’s validity,” the letter stated. “At the same time, we respectfully ask those contemporary Darwinians who seem intent on using Darwin’s theory as a vehicle for promoting an anti-theistic agenda to desist from doing so as they are, albeit unintentionally, turning people away from the theory.”

“In this year of all years, we should be celebrating Darwin’s great biological achievements and not fighting over his legacy as some kind of anti-theologian.”

In addition to Darwin’s birth, 2009 also marks the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in which he outlined his theory of evolution, and churches are marking both anniversaries with special seminars, exhibitions and events.

“We join in celebrating the life and work of Darwin because he helped us all to see better the intricacy of God’s creation, and forced us to wrestle once more with the eternal problems of good and evil,” Luscombe said.

Luscombe said that Darwin’s work revealed the power of the theory of evolution through natural selection and paved the way for modern science.

“The human genome project is only the latest example of research which is ultimately inspired by Darwin. All modern biological science relies on the foundation Darwin provided,” he added.

The Church of England is marking the anniversaries with the launch of a new section on its website highlighting the “forgotten” church work done by Darwin in his local parish of Downe in Kent.

The section has been launched by the Church to demonstrate that science and church work are not mutually exclusive and that although Darwin lost his own faith in the Christian religion, he still supported the Church and did not become anti-religious.

Articles tell of how Darwin used to supervise church and school finances, was founder and treasurer for 30 years of a “Friendly Club,” and ran the local Coal and Clothing Fund for 21 years.

The Rt. Rev. Dr. Lee Rayfield, Bishop of Swindon and a former biological scientist, said, “This bicentenary is providing a much needed opportunity to gather a more rounded appreciation of Charles Darwin, his life and his work. I hope these pages will assist broader reflection on the relationship between religious conviction and scientific endeavor in ways which will be creative for our own time.”

Not all are convinced, however, of Darwin’s theory. According to a survey of more than 2,000 people, recently published by religion think tank Theos, more than half of Britons believe the theory of evolution cannot explain the complexity of the natural world. One in three said they thought God created the Earth within the past 10,000 years.

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Creationists to Mark ‘Darwin Day’ with Anti-Evolution Conference (Christian Post, 090130)

While hundreds of celebrations worldwide will be marking the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth beginning in February, one creationist ministry will be holding conferences to refute the famed scientist’s theory of evolution.

Answers in Genesis, which runs the Creation Museum near Cincinnati, Ky., will host two free national conferences to help Christians defend their faith against a theory that the ministry sees as running counter to Scripture.

The two conferences, dubbed “Answers for Darwin,” will take place at two churches - one held on the West Coast and one on the East Coast - to provide training and education for Christians regarding evolution and creation.

The West Coast gathering is scheduled for Feb. 6-7 at Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, Calif. The East Coast event is set for Feb. 15-17 at Thomas Rd. Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va.

“So many Christians have been convinced by the academic elite that there is some validity to Darwin’s beliefs regarding evolution, and they try to find ways to compromise, and fit creation and evolution together,” said Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, who will be a key speaker at both conferences.

“We want to help them understand that Darwinian evolution is wrong, and that it has undermined the Christian faith and has fueled social ills like racism and abortion,” he said in a statement.

Other speakers at the California-based conference include Dr. Andrew Snelling, a scientist with Answers in Genesis who holds a Ph.D. in geology, and Dr. David Menton, a staff scientist with Answers in Genesis who holds a Ph.D. in biology.

Conference topics will include “Answer from Genesis on Darwin and the Culture Wars,” “Answers for Racism,” “Answers from Science and Scripture on the Real Age of the Earth” and “Answers from the Fossil Record – Creation vs. Darwinian Evolution.”

Speakers at the East Coast meeting will include Ham and Snelling as well as Liberty University professors Dr. David DeWitt, a Ph.D. scientist in neuroscience, and Dr. Marcus Ross, who holds a Ph.D. in geoscience. In addition to topics covered at the West Coast conference, the Virginia event will also address the topic “Answers about the ‘Ape-Men.’”

Ham, a Young Earth Creationist, believes in the literal interpretation of the six-day creation story in Genesis. The Creation Museum, which he founded, features exhibits that claim the world is only 6,000 years old, dinosaurs appeared on the same day God created other land animals, and geologic features such as the Grand Canyon and fossils were created in a global flood during the time of Noah.

“Many Christians are surprised when they learn that valid science confirms the biblical accounts of creation and Noah’s Flood,” added Ham. “Our mission at Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum is to spread that message in order to uphold all of Scripture and therefore reach non-believers with the gospel.”

A Newsweek poll last March found that evangelical Protestants (73%) were more likely than non-evangelical protestants (39%) to agree that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years. Catholics (41%) were more likely than non-evangelical protestants to agree with the statement.

Many Christians and most members of the Catholic Church accept a brand of evolution known as “theistic evolution,” which teaches that evolution was a tool used by God in the creation process.

Not all Christians will shun “Darwin Day.”

Some will join in events taking place this year that mark both the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of his published work, The Origin of Species.

Pope Benedict XVI plans to attend a March conference celebrating the Origin of the Species in Rome. The pontiff has maintained that the theory of evolution is compatible with the Bible.

According to a website devoted to celebrations (darwinday.org) there are 322 events taking place in 31 countries to commemorate “Darwin Day.”

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Ministry Challenges Darwin, Evolution in Film Project (Christian Post, 090203)

If Darwin knew what we know today, would he still have developed his theories?

That’s what Creation Ministries International, a non-profit group of Christian apologetics ministries, is posing in a documentary film project that challenges evolution.

As the world marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species and the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth on Feb. 12, CMI hopes to illustrate how the evolutionary viewpoint is far from the tried and tested science fact that many believe it to be, according to the ministry website.

Production for the Darwin Film Project began in February 2008 but the idea for the project originated years earlier when Dr. Emil Silvestru, a geologist for CMI in Canada, suggested re-examining Darwin’s ideas in time for the pivotal anniversaries in 2009.

“The 2009 anniversary cannot go unchallenged,” CMI states. “2009 is a pivotal opportunity for the church worldwide to challenge the false foundations of the theory of evolution … and time is short!”

According to CMI, the one-hour international broadcast documentary is one of the biggest documentary film ventures ever undertaken by a faith-funded Christian organization in the world. The project had a nearly $1 million budget and the entire film crew are Christians.

Meanwhile, evolutionists and media are busy preparing for celebrations worldwide, including over 400 Darwin Day events in 36 countries. Special events include feature films, TV documentaries, tall-ship re-enactments of the voyage of HMS Beagle, an international opera production, a world-traveling museum exhibition, numerous cultural events and many publications, with the latest being the free distribution of 200,000 “commissioned” comic strip books featuring Darwin as a children’s hero, according to CMI.

Those behind Darwin Film Project are aiming not only to challenge evolution but to also demonstrate that the Bible “can be trusted in matters of history and science,” including the origins of the universe.

“Throughout western society, where his ideas have been widely taught, many people think the Bible (and hence Christianity) simply isn’t relevant to their every day life,” CMI states. “They logically conclude that if the Bible is wrong about Creation, how can any of it be trusted?”

The non-denominational ministry works to present scientific support for creation as described in the Bible and hence to show that “the Bible can and should be trusted.”

The documentary, expected to release this month, will take a critical look at some of Darwin’s key ideas, and feature history footage from South America, period re-enactments and interviews with leading authorities, including evolutionists, from around the world.

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Creationist Conference on Refuting Darwin Draws 4,500 (Christian Post, 090217)

A conference hosted by a creationist ministry to help Christians defend their faith against evolution drew over 4,500 people during its opening evening on Sunday.

Ken Ham, founder and president of Answers in Genesis, which hosted the three-day “Answers for Darwin” conference, told the crowd in the opening session that America is becoming less of a Christian nation everyday and that it is due in part to the influence of Darwinism.

He cited statistics by research firm The Barna Group, showing that at least 60% of students raised in church-going homes who attend public schools will walk away from church.

Referring to the culture war, Ham said there are increasing pervasive attacks in America, including abortion and the removal of the Bible, prayer and creation from public schools.

“What is wrong?” he asked the audience at Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va. “I suggest to you the foundation is being taken out of this nation that was once here and we see the structure collapsing.”

Ham compared Christianity to a building, which without a foundation would collapse. For Christianity, that foundation is the authority of the Bible, he contended.

But the evolutionary theory proposed by Charles Darwin has helped to undermine biblical authority by challenging the account of creation in Genesis, according to Ham, who believes in the literal interpretation of the six-day creation story in Genesis.

“When you take out Genesis 1-11, it’s like taking out the foundation to a building and you would expect it to collapse,” he explained.

Ham noted the widespread negative influence of Darwinism.

Darwinism has been used to support racism and by Hitler to justify his actions, Ham claimed.

In Finland, the theory was cited by a student who shot a number of students and said it was a way of putting back to play natural selection and survival of the fittest.

Ham said that if children are taught about natural selection and natural processes, they are being taught in effect that they are just an animal.

“Is that ethically relevant?” he asked rhetorically.

The Young Earth Creationist urged the participants at the free event to not lose biblical authority, starting with what they teach their kids at home.

Many people in their homes have “imposed Christianity from the top-down on our kids but most of them go to schools where they give them a foundation to rebuild the structure,” he explained.

He said it was important that Christians raise their children to be able to give answers to a secular world and speak with authority.

Following Ham’s address, the crowd also listened to talks by Dr. Andrew Snelling, a scientist with Answers in Genesis who holds a Ph.D. in geology, and Liberty University professor Dr. David DeWitt, who holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience.

The “Answers for Darwin” conference, which runs until Wednesday, is being held in response to the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of his fundamental work The Origin of Species. Answers in Genesis hosted a similar conference in California earlier this month.

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Survey: Most Britons Reject Creationism, Intelligent Design (Christian Post, 090303)

[KH: Note the biased question as creationism is defined as the creation by God in the last 10000 years.]

LONDON – A new survey from theology think-tank Theos has found that 80% of people in the United Kingdom do not believe in creationism and intelligent design.

At the same time, almost half of British people did not know who wrote “On the Origin of Species,” in which Charles Darwin introduces evolution.

Interestingly, the poll found that 5% of adults believed Darwin to be the author of “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking, another three percent thought he wrote Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion,” while one percent thought him to be the author of cookery book “The Naked Chef.”

The survey of 2,060 people was prompted by the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the naturalist who penned the theory of evolution. The think tank published its results on a “belief map” which show the breakdown of results in each area of the UK.

Notably, the survey showed that nearly half the population believe that Christianity and evolution do not clash.

Almost half of those questioned said that the theory of evolution challenged Christianity, but said it was possible to believe in both.

According to the survey, most people in the UK reject ideas like creationism and intelligent design, with 83% rejecting the former and 89% the latter. The two theories about the origins of mankind contend that God created man in the last 10,000 years.

London is shown to have the highest percentage of people believing in creationism. While 17% of people across the UK believe human beings were created by God in the last 10,000 years, in London the average is 20%. Paul Woolley, director of Theos, said the difference may lie in the growth of Pentecostal churches in London.

The survey also found the Northern Ireland had the highest percentage of people who believe in intelligent design (16%) and creationism (25%).

“The research clearly indicates there is a great deal of confusion about what people believe and why they believe it,” Wolley noted. “There are two lessons in particular that we can learn from Darwin. The first is that belief in God and evolution are compatible. Secondly, in a time when debates about evolution and religious belief can be aggressive and polarized, Charles Darwin remains an example of how to disagree without being disagreeable.”

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Cardinal Calls Atheist’s Theories ‘Absurd’ (Christian Post, 090303)

[KH: regretful position by the Roman Catholic Church]

ROME (AP) — A Vatican cardinal said Tuesday that the Catholic Church does not stand in the way of scientific realities like evolution, though he described as “absurd” the atheist notion that evolution proves there is no God.

Cardinal William Levada, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, reiterated church teaching about faith and science at the start of a Vatican-sponsored conference marking the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species.”

Speaking on the sidelines of the conference, Levada said the Vatican believed there was a “wide spectrum of room” for belief in both the scientific basis for evolution and faith in God the creator.

“We believe that however creation has come about and evolved, ultimately God is the creator of all things,” he said.

He said that while the Vatican did not exclude any area of science, it did reject as “absurd” the atheist notion of biologist and author Richard Dawkins and others that evolution proves there is no God.

“Of course we think that’s absurd and not at all proven,” he said. “But other than that ... the Vatican has recognized that it doesn’t stand in the way of scientific realities.”

The Vatican under Pope Benedict XVI has been trying to stress its belief that there is no incompatibility between faith and reason, and the five-day conference at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University is a key demonstration of its efforts to engage with the scientific community.

Church teaching holds that Catholicism and evolutionary theory are not necessarily at odds. But the Vatican’s position became somewhat confused in recent years, in part because of a 2005 New York Times op-ed piece written by a close Benedict collaborator, Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn.

In the piece, Schoenborn seemed to reject traditional church teaching and back intelligent design, the view that life is too complex to have developed through evolution alone, and that a higher power has had a hand in changes among species over time.

Vatican officials later made clear they did not believe intelligent design was science and that teaching it alongside evolutionary theory in school classrooms only created confusion.

The evolution conference will explore intelligent design later this week, although not as science or theology but as a cultural phenomenon.

In his remarks, Levada referred to both Dawkins and the debate over teaching creationism in schools in the United States. He declined to pinpoint the Vatican’s views, saying merely: “The Vatican listens and learns.”

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Darwin Conference Does Not Speak for Vatican, Says Intelligent Design Proponent (Christian Post, 090306)

A leading intelligent design <http://christianpost.com/topics/intelligent_design> proponent said Friday that views expressed this week at a Darwin conference in Rome should not be confused with the Vatican’s position on intelligent design and Darwinism.

Organizers of the March 3-7 conference, “Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories,” at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome had declined to invite intelligent design speakers because they felt the theory lacked scientific merit.

Bruce Chapman, president of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, an intelligent design think tank, said he believes the Pope remains in serious “fruitful dialogue” with intelligent design even though speakers of the conference, sponsored by a Catholic Church-related agency, may be critical of the theory.

“The views of the Pope and views of people holding the conference are not the same,” Chapman told The Christian Post on Friday. “A large purpose of this conference was to criticize and trash intelligent design and try to make it seem like it’s the Vatican’s [point of view]. They are intentionally trying to confuse people.”

He added, “Not only is the Papal household keeping its distance from this conference, the Pope has said some things friendly to intelligent design and critical of Darwinism.”

The intelligent design proponent said Pope Benedict XVI was critical of evolution as a random process during the first homily he delivered. At his coronation, the Pope said, “We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God.”

Chapman, a Roman Catholic himself, emphasized that the conference’s sponsor, The Pontifical Council on Culture, is an office of the Vatican but represented neither the Vatican nor the Pope himself.

“Just because someone has money to come to Rome and have a conference doesn’t mean they speak for the Catholic Church, anymore than some Committee in the Senate or the House can speak for the United States government,” he said.

Moreover, Chapman pointed out that the event was funded by the John Templeton Foundation, which publicly opposes intelligent design.

In an article published Thursday, the Rev. Tomasz Tramfe, an official of the Pontifical Council on Culture and a Templeton representative told the Associated Press that Templeton did not place any restrictions on who was invited to speak.

“They sent us the proposal after they had most of the speakers already. We decided to make the grant in part because it is a really good speakers’ list,” Paul Wason, director of the Templeton Foundation’s science and religion programs, told AP.

Chapman, however, disputed the report, saying he was told by Tramfre in 2007 that it was the Templeton Foundation that prohibited scientists with views supporting intelligent design from speaking at the conference.

The restriction, according to Chapman, prevented intelligent design proponents such as Michael Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box, who is also Catholic, from defending their views at the conference.

Chapman indicated it wasn’t fair for organizers of the Darwin conference to allow staunch critics of intelligent design to speak while silencing a pro-ID voice.

“We are calling attention to their hypocrisy,” said Chapman. “You can’t attack people and not allow them to defend themselves.”

In their announcement of the conference last Fall, organizers emphasized that proponents of creationism and intelligent design would not be invited to participate.

Following the remark, the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of “First Things,” criticized the way the conference organizers “lump[ed] together” creationism and intelligent design.

“They are quite distinct enterprises; the former is typically in defense of a literal reading of Genesis while the latter is a scientifically based theory of purpose or teleology in natural development,” wrote Neuhaus in the December issue of the Catholic-based journal.

In an AP article on Thursday, the conference director said organizers thought the inclusion of intelligent design in the event would make dialogue “very difficult” because they did not consider it to be “a scientific perspective, nor a theological or philosophical one.”

Chapman acknowledged that critics, often left-leaning journalists, cause confusion by associating intelligent design with creationism.

He said a headline by FOXNews that read, “Creationists, Intelligent Design Advocates Blast Vatican for Not Inviting Them to Evolution Conference,” was misleading.

“The opposite is true. We were defending the Vatican and the Catholic Church,” Chapman clarified.

The Discovery Institute president went on to explain the difference between microevolution, changes that takes place over time within the species, with macroevolution, the process by which one species becomes another species.

He said that while intelligent design proponents and the Catholic Church accept microevolution, he believes both reject the proposal by Darwin that unguided random chance and mutation produces new species and how it suggests life was created that way.

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How Intelligent Design Is Misrepresented by Its Friends (Christian Post, 090821)

[KH: believe in theistic evolution]

In my last intelligent design post I complained that Expelled creates the (erroneous) perception that ID is anti-Darwin, religious, and committed to assuming God is the designer. Now on to provide some examples.

Let’s begin with the point when Ben Stein considers Francis Crick’s attempt to explain the apparent design of DNA. Though an atheist, Crick concedes that DNA may have been designed, but then he suggests that this design could have resulted from intelligent alien life (i.e. the theory of directed panspermia).

Instead of seriously engaging this proposal of an alien designer, Stein dismisses it with a condescending sneer: “I thought we were talking about science, not science fiction!” This may play for cheap laughs among some conservative Christian viewers, but the cost of this quip is high. How so? Because granting the possibility of an alien designer establishes that ID hypotheses are not necessarily theistic, and that is important to refute the dogged claim that ID is merely “creationism in a cheap tuxedo”.

Not only is ID not necessarily pro-theistic, neither is it necessarily anti-Darwin. Remember Paul Nelson’s definition of ID in the film: “a minimal commitment scientifically to the possibility of detecting intelligent causation”. It follows that there is no necessary conflict between ID and the Darwinian thesis that species originated through a process of random mutation and natural selection (so long as “random” is not defined tendentiously in an absolute metaphysical sense).

Sadly, just as Expelled marginalizes non-thesistic ID theories, so it ignores pro-Darwin Christian theology. Or if not quite ignoring it, it only pays attention to it long enough to dismiss it. Consider one interview where Eugenie Scott (of the NCSC) says to Ben Stein: “The most important group we work with is members of the faith community because the best kept secret in this controversy is that Catholics and mainstream Protestants are okay on evolution.”

Scott is entirely correct in noting this woefully under-reported fact. But instead of engaging the work of the many, many theologians who embrace evolution, Stein’s offers this condescending reply: “Are you sure about that Eugenie?” Next, he substantiates his implied skepticism by interviewing not a theologian but rather a theologically uninformed journalist who dismisses all pro-Darwin theologians as “liberals”. Unless that journalist tendentiously defines liberal theologian as “one who accepts evolution”, this is merely a cheap ad hominem (assuming that “liberal” is meant as an insult).

Not content with defining all pro-Darwin theologians as liberals, this journalist then makes the following completely outrageous claim: “Implicit in most evolutionary theory is that either there is no God or God cannot have anything, any role in it. So naturally, as many evolutionists will say, it’s the strongest engine for atheism.” Sure Richard Dawkins would agree with that. But why not interview some of the majority of Christian theologians who would not?

It is not that Expelled completely shuts out theologians who accept evolution. Indeed, Stein interviews a number of them including Alister McGrath, John Lennox and John Polkinghorne. The only problem is that he never broaches the topic of theistic evolution, or even tips off the viewer that these theologians hold these views.

After a horribly skewed survey of the issues Stein draws his predictable conclusion: “It appears Darwinism does lead to atheism....” To this I say: only if you want it to Mr. Stein.

___________________________________________

Randal Rauser is associate professor of historical theology at Taylor Seminary, Edmonton, Canada and was granted Taylor’s first annual teaching award for Outstanding Service to Students in 2005.

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‘Creation’ Producer Blames American Evolution Flap for Film’s U.S. Flop (Christian Post, 090915)

The producer of a new film that tells the “true story” of 19th-century naturalist Charles Darwin believes a distributor in the United States has not yet been found because of the divide that exists in America over the theory of evolution.

“It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the U.S., and it’s because of what the film is about,” Jeremy Thomas told the London-based Telegraph ahead of the European premiere of “Creation.”

“People have been saying this is the best film they’ve seen all year, yet nobody in the U.S. has picked it up,” he added. “It is unbelievable to us that this is still a really hot potato in America.”

“Creation,” which opened the Toronto Film Festival last week and made its European premiere this past Sunday, tells the story of Darwin and how the world-renowned scientist’s landmark work, “The Origin of Species,” came to light.

Though Darwin’s theory of evolution plays a big role in the movie, actor Benedict Cumberbatch said the story presented in “Creation” is “a very universal story.”

The movie, which stars Paul Bettany in the leading role, reveals Darwin as a dedicated family man struggling to accept his daughter’s death and torn between his love for his deeply religious wife and his own “growing belief in a world where God has no place,” according to the film’s synopsis.

“You’ve got a film that is a very intimate biographical portrait of a man and that’s a rich and beautiful and informing celebration of his life,” said Cumberbatch, who stars in the movie as Joseph Dalton Hooker, one of the founders of geographical botany and Darwin’s closest friend.

While Darwin is “the hero of the film,” producer Thomas said he and his crew “tried to make the film in a very even-handed way.”

“Darwin wasn’t saying ‘kill all religion’, he never said such a thing, but he is a totem for people,” the Oscar winner told the Telegraph.

Still, with only 39% of Americans claiming to believe in the theory of evolution, finding a distributor in the United States proved to be a difficult task for the “Creation” team.

“It’s quite difficult for we in the U.K. to imagine religion in America,” Thomas stated. “We live in a country which is no longer so religious. But in the U.S., outside of New York and LA, religion rules.”

Notably, however, while the Gallup organization had only found 39% of Americans saying they believe in the theory of evolution, only 25% said they do not believe in the theory. The remaining 36% of respondents in Gallup’s February 2009 poll said they had no opinion either way.

Also worth noting is Gallup’s finding that only 55% of Americans were able to correctly associate Darwin with the theory of evolution and/or natural selection. Ten percent, meanwhile, gave an incorrect response and 34% said they were unsure or didn’t know.

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‘Creation’ Producer Called Out for ‘Too Controversial for Religious America’ Claim (Christian Post, 090920)

A prominent young earth creationist said recent claims by the producer of the movie “Creation” are “nonsense” and simply part of an effort to create controversy and garner publicity.

In an interview with the London-based Telegraph ahead of last week’s European premiere of “Creation,” producer Jeremy Thomas had suggested that the debate over creation and evolution in America was what kept potential U.S. distributors of the Charles Darwin movie at bay.

“It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the U.S., and it’s because of what the film is about,” Thomas had said.

“Creation,” which opened the Toronto Film Festival earlier this month and made its European premiere last Sunday, tells the story of Darwin and how the 19th-century naturalist’s landmark work, “The Origin of Species,” came to light.

It also reveals the world-renowned scientist as a dedicated family man struggling to accept his daughter’s death and torn between his love for his deeply religious wife and his own “growing belief in a world where God has no place,” according to the film’s synopsis.

“You’ve got a film that is a very intimate biographical portrait of a man and that’s a rich and beautiful and informing celebration of his life,” said actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who stars in the movie as Joseph Dalton Hooker, one of the founders of geographical botany and Darwin’s closest friend.

Despite the “very universal” storyline, the film’s producer said “Creation” is apparently “too controversial for religious America.”

“There’s still a great belief that He (God) made the world in six days,” Thomas told the Telegraph. “It’s quite difficult for we (sic) in the U.K. to imagine religion in America. We live in a country which is no longer so religious. But in the U.S., outside of New York and LA, religion rules.”

Ken Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis and the Creation museum, however, believes Thomas’ claim is “nonsense.”

“If a movie is controversial, I’m sure it would be shown - as it would probably get good attendance and make money,” he commented Sunday. “And if the movie was anti-creation/anti-Christian, would that stop the movie industry taking it up? Not at all-to the contrary.”

To make his point, Ham noted anti-Christian and anti-creationism movies such as Bill Maher’s “Religulous” and “Inherit the Wind,” which were shown in theaters nationwide.

“In fact, it seems to me that if a film attacks Christianity and is well produced, the movie industry in America would jump at the opportunity to show it to the public,” he stated.

But that is if it would make money.

Ham suggested the reason why “Creation” has not picked up a U.S. distributor is because a film about the life of Charles Darwin may not do well in American theaters, though it might do well as a “docu-drama” on a television station such as the History Channel.

“I haven’t seen the movie, but I have read a number of reviews - and it seems to me from what I’ve read that it is not really an exciting movie. Some have even called it ‘boring,’” Ham stated.

That said, Ham reported that he does hope to hear from supporters of his ministry in the United Kingdom regarding the movie when it hits theaters there this Friday.

That is, however, if they do choose to spend money on such a movie.

Ham and his supporters, like other young earth creationists, ascribe to a literal understanding of the book of Genesis and therefore believe God created all things over the course of six literal days.

According to the Gallup organization, which has polled U.S. adults about their beliefs on evolution and creation since 1982, 44% of Americans surveyed last year said they believe God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.

36%, meanwhile, said they believe that man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but that God guided the process, including man’s creation.

Only 14% believe man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life and that God had no part in the process.

The figures have remained relatively the same over the past nearly three-decades, with the last group having shown a significant – though slight – increase.

==============================

‘Ardi’ Reverses Common Understanding of Human Evolution (Christian Post, 091002)

A team of researchers unveiled Thursday research findings on the skeleton of a hominid who is now being touted by some as the earliest known human ancestor of modern-day man.

The multinational team of 47 researchers, who have been studying the bones of “Ardi” since they were discovered in 1994, presented the oldest known skeleton of the “potential human ancestor,” calling it by far the most complete among those of the earliest specimens found.

The skeleton, found in Ethiopia and thought to be 4.4-million years old, includes most of the skull and teeth, as well as the pelvis, hands, and feet - parts that the researchers say reveal an “intermediate” form of upright walking, considered a hallmark of hominins.

“This species … resolves many uncertainties about early human evolution, including the nature of the last common ancestor that we shared with the line leading to living chimpanzees and bonobos,” commented team member Tim D. White, director of the Human Evolution Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

“The most popular reconstructions of human evolution during the past century rested on the presumption that the behaviors of the earliest hominids were related to [or even natural amplifications of] behaviors observed in these living great apes (Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas … our closest living relatives),” added anthropologist C. O. Lovejoy of Kent State University. “Ardipithecus ramidus nullifies these presumptions, as it shows that the anatomy of living African apes is not primitive but instead has evolved specifically within extant ape lineages.”

Simply put, this means the new skeleton reverses the common understanding of human evolution. Rather than humans evolving from an ancient chimp-like creature, “Ardi” provides evidence that chimps and humans evolved from some long-ago common ancestor - but each evolved and changed separately along the way.

“This is not that common ancestor, but it’s the closest we have ever been able to come,” White told The Associated Press.

Following Thursday’s announcement, some critics of evolution theory used the latest buzz to point out that “faith” is required to believe pro-evolution scientists who are themselves unsure about many things and constantly changing what they believe to be true.

“‘Six months ago, we would have said our common ancestor looked something like a chimp,’” Christian preacher Ray Comfort cited White as having said. “‘Now all that has changed.’ Sure has. And it will change again, and again, and again. I know, ‘that’s what real science does.’”

Comfort, who has been drawing attention and controversy this past week for his plan to distribute tens of thousands of anti-evolution books to university students, said he needs “hard evidence,” and for him, that comes from Christianity.

“I know where we came from (on the highest Authority), I know why we are here and I know where I am going after death,” he stated Thursday.

“[I]t’s hard to argue with the sort of devotion that evolutionists have,” Comfort added, calling the findings of the Ardi researchers a “faith matter.”

While 44 percent of Americans would likely side with Comfort, believing that God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years, there are almost as many (36 percent) who believe that man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but that God guided the process, including man’s creation.

The latter group, which includes theistic evolutionists and evolutionary creationists, argue that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist.

“We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests,” state signers of the Clergy Letter Project, which has been endorsed by over 11,000 ministers.

“To reject this truth or to treat it as ‘one theory among others’ is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children,” they add in their open letter concerning religion and science .

Many Christian denominations and bodies such as the United Church of Christ and the National Council of Churches USA [KH: very liberal] have issued similar statements.

==============================

Creationists: Ardi Poses No ‘Threat’ (Christian Post, 091006)

While a media outlets around the world are touting a nearly two-decade-old find as the oldest known skeleton of a potential human ancestor, creationists point out that even the team of researchers who unveiled the reconstructed fossil cannot refute the possibility that it might be simply that of an extinct ape.

“Based on our first look … the facts seem solidly behind the idea that Ardi was a quadrupedal ape with relatively little in common with humans (i.e., no more than most apes),” wrote staff members at the apologetics ministry Answers in Genesis, referring to the skeleton by its nickname.

“[T]he key basis for the alleged Ardi–human link (which even the authors are hesitant to confirm) is the idea that it walked upright-an idea that even evolutionists have criticized,” the ministry added. “And we can’t forget that all of these conclusions are inferred from digital reconstructions and fallible reconstructions of bones that were in very bad shape.

“As far as we’re concerned, the evolutionary ‘threat’ to creationists from Ardi is no more than that posed by Ida: viz., none,” they concluded, referring to the 47-million-year-old fossil touted earlier this year as the “missing link” between prosimian primates and anthropoid primates.

Last Thursday, a multinational team of 47 researchers, who have been studying the bones of “Ardi” since they were discovered in the early 1990s, presented them as those belonging to the oldest known “potential human ancestor,” Ardipithecus ramidus.

The skeleton, found in Ethiopia and thought to be 4.4-million years old, includes most of the skull and teeth, as well as the pelvis, hands, and feet – parts that the researchers say reveal an “intermediate” form of upright walking, considered a hallmark of hominids.

According to the Institute for Creation Research, however, placing Ardi into human ancestry creates more problems than it solves.

“For example, Ardipithecus’ body structure shows no objective or undisputable transition toward uniquely human features,” the creationist group stated.

“Speculation and evolutionary guesswork, not scientific observations, are offered to bridge these gaps,” it added.

And, as Answers in Genesis noted, Ardi is a partial skeleton put together based on the bone fragments of at least 35 sets of skeletons – many of which were in such bad shape that it took 15 years before the research team could fully analyze and publish its findings on the combined skeleton.

“[A]s a starting point, creationists should remember that - as with many fossils - the state of preservation is far less perfect than what media images and ‘reconstructions’ portray,” the ministry pointed out.

Furthermore, Ardi’s feet had opposable big toes and lacked arches, which suggests that she – or more correctly, they – could not walk or run for long distances and also suggests that she did not walk upright as some believe she may have.

“This is a fascinating skeleton, but based on what they present, the evidence for bipedality is limited at best,” anatomist William Jungers of Stony Brook University told National Geographic News.

“Divergent big toes are associated with grasping, and this has one of the most divergent big toes you can imagine. Why would an animal fully adapted to support its weight on its forelimbs in the trees elect to walk bipedally on the ground?” he posed.

Based on these and other points, Answers in Genesis suggested that the ongoing pressure for scientists to find something of “evolutionary significance” could have led to a systematic incentive to make a huge deal out of otherwise “trivial fossils.”

“We must admit that from our perspective, we’re growing desensitized to the fervor that increasingly surrounds each new fossil discovery claimed to support evolution,” the ministry expressed.

“[T]he concerted release of so many papers on Ardi and the corresponding hubbub seems to perhaps be more about attention-seeking than about science,” it added.

In the 11 papers published in the Oct. 2 issue of Science magazine and online, the team of 47 researchers revealed their findings and described how Ardipithecus ramidus might have looked and moved, but, as the Institute for Creation Research noted, used the word “probably” about 78 times and “suggest,” “suggesting,” “suggestive,” or “suggests” 117 times, among “other terms that are associated with an unsubstantiated story rather than a scientific description.”

The publishing of the papers happens to coincide with the 200th anniversary year of the birth of 19th-century naturalist Charles Darwin, who introduced the theory that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors through a process of natural selection.

Although in the scientific community there is essentially universal agreement that the evidence of evolution is overwhelming, and the scientific consensus supporting the modern evolutionary synthesis is nearly absolute, creationists have asserted that there is a significant scientific controversy and disagreement over the validity of evolution.

According to the Gallup organization, which has polled U.S. adults about their beliefs on evolution and creation since 1982, 44 percent of Americans surveyed last year said they believe God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.

Thirty-six percent, meanwhile, said they believe that man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but that God guided the process, including man’s creation.

Only 14 percent believe man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life and that God had no part in the process.

The figures have remained relatively the same over the past nearly three-decades, with the last group having shown a significant – though slight – increase.

==============================

Darwin Was Wrong, Scientists Argue (Christian Post, 091116)

Darwin was wrong, a group of scientists argued at a conference in southern California.

Scientists presented evidence over the weekend refuting Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution on many levels – including fossil record, natural selection and the origin of man – and his works in geology and other science areas.

“Natural selection happens but it does not do what Darwin needed it to do,” said geneticist Dr. John Sanford. “Darwin built a worldview that has come to be the governing paradigm of the intellectual community; that worldview is now collapsing in the face of new advances in science.”

Sanford was among a number of scientists who spoke at the “Darwin Was Wrong” conference at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa, Nov. 13-14. The two-day event, organized by Logos Research Associates, Inc., was held to mark the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s Origin of Species, which people around the world have been celebrating this year.

“It is amazing to me that in this ‘year of Darwin,’ the whole world is bowing down to this man even while modern science is proving him wrong on all fronts,” said Sanford.

On one front, Darwin was wrong about the origin of man, Dr. Robert Carter argued Saturday.

Carter refuted Darwin’s three main arguments, as laid out in Descent of Man, of homology (similar features shared among similar species), embryonic recapitulation (embryo goes through evolutionary stages), and vestigial organs (organs that have no apparent nor predictable function).

He further asserted that Darwin was a “brilliant writer” but not such a great scientist.

“Darwin’s greatest gift is not as a scientist; it’s as a wordsmith,” Carter maintained.

The Atlanta, Ga., scientist, who serves at Creation Ministries International, also shot down the discoveries of “Lucy,” “Ida,” and “Ardi” as possible missing links between apes and humans.

Some evolutionists say Lucy was actually a man, citing the shape of the pelvis, Carter pointed out.

“So if they misclassified her as a female do we know if she walked upright or not?” Carter posed, noting that evolutionists conclude from the pelvic bones that Lucy walked upright.

With questions being raised, Carter believes evolutionists are pushing Lucy off to the side and “preparing her to go away.”

“They never remove one of these ancestors until they have a replacement,” he noted.

Last spring the bones of “Ida” were revealed. She was a lemur-like creature that was labeled as another missing link between apes and non-apes.

But when the fanfare and media hype died down, scientists realized the skeleton was just a lemur.

More recently, the media has been all over “Ardi,” which has been touted by some as the earliest known human ancestor of modern-day man and by far the most complete among those of the earliest specimens found. But Ardi was actually discovered nearly two decades ago.

“Why the media blitz now?” Carter, who didn’t grow up a young earth creationist, asked. “I think because they’re trying to find a replacement ... to put more missing links in the chain.”

So what’s left? “Not much,” he maintained.

In addition to shooting down evolutionary arguments, Carter offered a “replacement” on the origin of man, using the Bible. He presented genetic data from the biblical accounts of Adam and Eve and Noah’s family to show how the Bible is really the history of mankind.

Other arguments presented over the weekend included “Darwin was wrong about science” and “Darwin was wrong about God.”

The conference was designed to present scientific evidence highlighting Darwin’s mistakes and also to equip Christians with such knowledge.

==============================

Ministry Distributes ‘Origin of Species’ with Intelligent Design Intro (Christian Post, 091119)

Ministry leader Ray Comfort surprised college students and atheists throughout the country on Wednesday when his planned giveaway of On the Origin of Species came one day early.

The book is a special 150th anniversary edition of Charles Darwin’s work. But what has many atheists riled up is the added pro-Intelligent Design 50-page introduction, written by Comfort.

When Comfort announced that his ministry, Living Waters, would be distributing more than 100,000 free copies of the special edition to the 100 top U.S. universities, many atheists denounced the effort as shameful in online forums.

“This is a shameful thing that Kirk Cameron and [Ray Comfort] are doing by altering another person’s book in order to push their agenda,” a post on the “Kirk Cameron has gone too far” Facebook page reads. “But we can help to restore the book to how it was intended and keep young minds from being brainwashed by misinformation.”

The giveaway campaign was originally scheduled for Nov. 19. But some students against Comfort’s edition encouraged peers to get a hold of as many of the books as possible on the day of distribution to rip out the introduction, which includes a rebuttal to evolution and links the theory to Hitler and racism.

The angry backlash and planned protests prompted Comfort to move the campaign date to Wednesday.

“When Kirk Cameron and I produced a short video-clip explaining what I wanted to do (and posted it online) we were very surprised at the reaction. We kicked a hornet’s nest. A big one,” the ministry leader said. “[T]here is such a deep-rooted anger in the atheist world about this publication. They desperately want to stop us.”

Comfort decided to publish On the Origin of Species with a special introduction offering an alternative perspective when he discovered that Darwin’s work was public domain.

“Keeping intelligent design out of schools, is a hill to die on for evolutionists, so when I found that Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was available in the public domain, I had an idea that would get the truth onto college campuses,” he said.

The first printing of the book left out four chapters and Darwin’s introduction. According to the ministry, they were randomly removed to reduce the cost of printing. But in the second printing, they dropped the text size, which reduced the number of pages, and reproduced Darwin’s entire book. The books distributed to students on Wednesday came from the second printing.

The National Center for Science Education, which defends the teaching of evolution in public schools, responded by creating a “Don’t Diss Darwin” website. It features an analysis of Comfort’s introduction and directs visitors to resources devoted to evolutionary science.

Comfort, meanwhile, doesn’t understand why so many atheists are offended. He pointed out that there have been more than 140 different editions of On the Origin of Species, many with their own introductions. His edition simply gave an alternative, Comfort said.

“The exchange of ideas is healthy,” he noted.

“Charles Darwin said that both perspectives should be given, and we are giving both in a 50-page Introduction. Like Darwin, we want people to read the two points of view and make up their own minds.”

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Intelligent Design Group Sues Calif. Science Center (Christian Post, 091203)

The Discovery Institute, an intelligent design think tank, has filed a petition against the California Science Center for refusing to disclose certain public documents.

The petition comes after the American Freedom Alliance filed a lawsuit against the science center for canceling a contract to screen a pro-intelligent design video at the center’s IMAX Theater.

Following the cancellation, the Discovery Institute requested the center to release public documents under the California Public Records Act. On Nov. 2, the center released 44 pages of documents and claimed no documents were withheld, except some personal information such as telephone numbers and email addresses.

However, the intelligent design think tank contends the claims are false and that some e-mail communications, including ones with the Smithsonian Institution – which allegedly expressed angst over the screening – and ones by decision makers, were not disclosed.

“The Center withheld public communications by decision makers who cancelled the contract with AFA,” said Casey Luskin, program officer in Public Policy and Legal Affairs at the Discovery Institute. “We believe the reason the California Science Center withheld these public documents is simple: the e-mails show evidence of discrimination against the pro-intelligent design viewpoint.”

The film, “Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record,” had been scheduled to be shown at the California Science Center on Oct. 25. The Los Angeles premiere was being sponsored by the AFA.

“Darwin’s Dilemma” is the third film in the intelligent design trilogy from Illustra Media. It explores the Cambrian explosion, “when in a moment of geological time complex animals first appeared on earth fully formed, without evidence of any evolutionary ancestors.” Some of the scientists interviewed in the film propose the theory of intelligent design as an alternative explanation for the appearance of animal life in the Cambrian period.

Pro-evolution film “We Are Born of the Stars” was also scheduled to be shown to provide balance to a discussion about life’s origin after the screening.

However, early in October, the center canceled its contract with the AFA, according to the Discovery Institute. The AFA alleges in its lawsuit that museum officials were fearful of having intelligent design discussed in any context.

AFA says its free speech rights were violated and alleges that CSC officials “conspired to drop the event because they did not want the museum to be viewed as legitimizing intelligent design as a scientific theory.”

A request was made to the center for the release of public documents.

Among some of the documents obtained, one e-mail sent by University of Southern California professor Hilary Schor on Oct. 6 states, “I’m less troubled by the freedom of speech issues [i.e., the suppression of freedom of speech] than why my tax dollars which support the California Science Center are being spent on hosting religious propaganda!”

Another document shows Ken Phillips, a curator at the CSC, stating, “I personally have a real problem with anything that elevates the concept of intelligent design to a level that makes it appear as though it should be considered equally alongside Darwinian theory as a possible alternative to natural selection. In other words, I see us getting royally played by the Center for Science and Culture resulting in long term damage to our credibility and judgment for a very long time. … No institute supporting an essentially religious philosophy of creation is required to assure that appropriate critique comes to bear on the Darwinian theory.”

AFA and the Discovery Institute argue that the cancellation was a result of discrimination and “intolerance for the scientific viewpoint expressed and scientific content contained in ‘Darwin’s Dilemma.’”

“[I]t is a fundamental principle of First Amendment jurisprudence that when a governmental entity or sub-unit (such as CSC) opens its facilities as a public forum, it is not constitutionally permissible to censor speech based on viewpoint or content,” the think tank maintains.

The California Science Center, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, is a public-private partnership between the State of California and the not-for-profit California Science Center Foundation.

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Tetrapod Footprint Discovery Busts Evolutionary Paradigm, Says Biochemist (Christian Post, 100110)

The latest discovery of fossilized footprints made by four-legged vertebrates overthrows the evolutionary model for how land animals first emerged, says a biochemist.

“This is a huge discovery,” said Dr. Fuz Rana of Reasons to Believe, a science-faith think tank. “[It’s] another example of supposedly a well-established evolutionary story, that has presumable fossil evidence to support it, that is now blown out of the water by a single find.”

Paleontologists from Poland and Sweden discovered dozens of 397-million-year-old fossil footprints in the Holy Cross Mountains of southeastern Poland, as revealed in the January 7 issue of the journal Nature. The prints were made by tetrapods, which are vertebrate animals with four limbs.

Grzegorz Pienkowski, a paleontologist at Warsaw University, told National Geographic that they are the oldest tetrapod tracks and the oldest evidence of true tetrapods.

What’s significant about the discovery is the age of the tracks. While evolutionists have firmly held that tetrapods appeared about 375 million years ago after transitional forms between fishes and land animals appeared 385 million years ago, the latest discovery places tetrapods in existence even before the transitional animals.

“The finds suggests that the elpistostegids (transitional forms) that we know were late-surviving relics rather than direct transitional forms, and they highlight just how little we know of the earliest history of land vertebrates,” the journal’s editor writes.

Per Ahlberg, a paleontologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, who led the new research, told CNN, “In the course of a single afternoon I found myself revising the entire understanding I had of my own research.”

Rana believes the find basically throws a “monkey wrench” into the long-held evolutionary model.

“Transitional forms are appearing in the fossil record after the appearance of the forms that they presumably evolved into and that simply doesn’t make any sense,” Rana said. “You have to take fossil record at face value. Evidence has to match the story.”

“At this point there’s no evolutionary explanation in my mind for how land animals appeared,” he added. “People who are skeptics of the evolutionary paradigm are even more justifiable in their skepticism today than they were yesterday because of this particular discovery.”

Suspicions against the evolutionary model of the appearance of land animals existed even before the discovery of the tracks in Poland, Rana said. For one, the transition from lobe-finned fish – the transitional forms – to true tetrapods is documented to have happened in a time window of only about 10 million years, which is “incredibly rapid to go from a totally aquatic animal to one that would be able to live on land,” Rana argues.

Additionally, the footprints of the tetrapod in Poland were produced in a coastal environment, not a freshwater one, as previously understood and accepted.

Rana expects scientists to now scour for fossils of the animals that made the footprints.

In the meantime, Rana offers, “It’s going to be hard in my opinion to really assail this discovery as being anything other than what it really is right now ... and that is a paradigm buster.”

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‘Creation’ Movie to Make U.S. Debut (Christian Post, 100120)

[NOTE: anti-creation movie]

A film that tells the “true story” of 19th-century naturalist Charles Darwin will finally be making its U.S. debut this weekend – nearly four months after its worldwide release.

“Creation,” which stars Paul Bettany in the leading role, will be distributed in limited theaters through Newmarket Films, which picked up the movie just days after the its producer garnered media attention by suggesting that the film had not found a distributor due to the divide that exists in America over the theory of evolution.

creation movie

In September, producer Jeremy Thomas told the London-based Telegraph ahead of the European premiere of “Creation” that the movie had picked up a distributor “everywhere else in the world but in the U.S. … because of what the film is about.”

“People have been saying this is the best film they’ve seen all year, yet nobody in the U.S. has picked it up,” he said. “It is unbelievable to us that this is still a really hot potato in America.”

Not long afterward, Newmarket Films picked up the movie, announcing late last September that they “pride ourselves in getting behind important films that help open the door for discussion and conversation, as is the case with ‘Creation.’”

“While Darwin’s name has come to symbolize one side of a debate between the scientific and the theological, ‘Creation’ personifies the debate, with both sides contending, sometimes violently, within the man,” stated Newmarket’s Chris Ball. “In that sense, we believe that the film will appeal both to people of faith and people of science.”

Based on the book “Annie’s Box,” written by Darwin’s great-grandson Randal Keynes, “Creation” tells the story of Darwin and how the world-renowned scientist’s landmark work, “The Origin of Species,” came to light.

Though Darwin’s theory of evolution plays a big role in the movie, actor Benedict Cumberbatch (who played the role of Darwin’s closest friend, British botanist Joseph Hooker) said the story presented in “Creation” is “a very universal story.”

The movie reveals Darwin as a dedicated family man struggling to accept his daughter’s death and torn between his love for his deeply religious wife and his own “growing belief in a world where God has no place,” according to the film’s synopsis.

Despite the “very universal” storyline, the film’s producer said “Creation” was apparently “too controversial for religious America” when finding a distributor in the United States proved to be a difficult task for the “Creation” team.

Coincidentally (or not), the few cities in which “Creation” will be making its U.S. debut are reportedly New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, and Boston.

Thirty-six percent, meanwhile, said they believe that man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but that God guided the process, including man’s creation.

Only 14% believe man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life and that God had no part in the process.

The figures have remained relatively the same over the past nearly three-decades, with the last group having shown a significant – though slight – increase.

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Do You Accept ‘Old Earth’ and Evolution? (Christian Post, 100301)

By John Piper

The following is an edited transcript of the audio.

Do you accept “old earth” and evolution?

If by “accept” you mean, “Are there people on our counsel of elders who hold to the old earth theory?” then, Yes.

If by “accept” you mean, “Is that my view?” here is what I said the other day when the church staff was talking about this. We spent about an hour, talking about how we as a church should orient ourselves in the conversation about old earth and young earth, and I said that there seem to be two viable, biblical views for me. (This is going to offend a lot of people.)

One is young earth, because it seems to me that the natural reading of Genesis 1 is 24-hour days, not Day-Age.

And two, the view that John Sailhamer wrote in Genesis Unbound or in his other books, which says that all of creation happened in verses 1 and 2. It may be as old as 4 trillion years, as far as he is concerned, and what was happening in Genesis 1 each day was not the bringing into being of the earth and its various forms, but rather the ordering, managing and structuring of things. This allows for 24 hour days but also allows for an old earth. [KH: gap theory]

I lean that way. I don’t believe in evolution as the way that Adam came to be a human. I think God created Adam from the dust of the ground. I think he was unique and that he is the father of all humanity-Adam and Eve-and that he is not the product of a long evolutionary process. I can’t make that jive with the way the text reads.

And I think that it’s very important that Adam be a historical figure, because that’s the way he is treated by the other biblical writers. The heart passage in Romans 5 collapses, and the whole nature of God’s making with Adam a covenant and then him failing and then Christ being a second Adam comes to naught, if he’s not a historical person.

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Evangelical Professor at Center of Evolution Flap Sets Record Straight (Christian Post, 100414)

The evangelical professor who resigned from his position last week following the commotion over a pro-evolution video set the record straight over the weekend with an open letter to his colleagues.

The chancellor of Reformed Theological Seminary also issued a statement to make it clear to the public that the multi-site school did not force Dr. Bruce Waltke to resign but had accepted the resignation that the professor, himself, had initiated.

“The RTS community and I want to readily and sincerely confirm our deep and abiding affection for Bruce Waltke,” RTS Chancellor Ric Cannada wrote in his statement Sunday.

“Bruce initiated the offer to resign after a certain video became public which was bringing harm to RTS,” he added.

The video in question, posted late last month, was part of an interview that the BioLogos Foundation had with Waltke during the 2009 Theology of Celebration workshop he attended in New York City.

In the video, titled “Bruce Waltke: Why Must the Church Accept Evolution?” and now no longer on the web, the distinguished Old Testament scholar discusses the danger the Church will face if it does not engage with the world around it – in particular with the issue of evolution, which many evangelicals reject.

“[I]f the data is overwhelmingly in favor of evolution, to deny that reality will make us a cult … some odd group that is not really interacting with the world,” said Waltke in the video that went up on YouTube and the website of the BioLogos Foundation as part of its “Conversations” collection.

“And rightly so, because we are not using our gifts and trusting God’s Providence that brought us to this point of our awareness,” he added.

While Waltke believes that creation by the process of evolution is a tenable biblical position and the best Christian apologetic to defend Genesis 1-3 against its critics, many evangelicals cannot reconcile the belief in evolution with the authority of the Bible.

RTS, for one, states in its website that it believes “it is very important to reaffirm the Bible as the final authority for God’s people” and claims that modern science, philosophy, and popular opinion have led many to deny the authority of Scripture.

“You will never find our professors questioning the absolute authority of the Bible,” the school states. “Instead, we face the challenges of living for Christ by submitting ourselves absolutely to the Old and New Testaments as our ultimate authority.”

While the administration of RTS had asked Waltke to request that the video be removed from BioLogos’ website and YouTube page after its posting, RTS Chancellor Cannada made it clear Sunday that many national news outlets and blogs made “incorrect statements” and applied “wrong motives” to RTS when reporting on the incident.

Notably, however, Waltke’s sudden resignation and RTS’s brief announcement of it last week only fueled speculations and resulted in a large volume of comments condemning RTS for the move.

“Ric’s acceptance of my resignation has only added to the emotional turmoil,” Waltke acknowledged.

To set the record straight, Waltke expressed in his open letter Friday that he finds no fault with the RTS administration and thinks they did the right thing.

The Old Testament professor also apologized to his colleagues and the chancellor especially for not handling the matter more discretely.

Had he vetted the video, Waltke says he would have done a number of things differently – seven, according to his letter – including titling the video “why the church should accept creation by the process of evolution” instead of “why the church must accept evolution.”

Waltke said he would have clarified in writing that the evolution he referred to was theistic evolution, not naturalistic evolution.

He also would have not included his position as an RTS professor in the video, as he was speaking as an individual, not a representative of RTS.

“This,” Waltke said, “was the real problem.”

Now, in the aftermath, Waltke’s hope is that RTS’s reputation will not be tarnished from the incident. He also hopes that the fiasco will not hinder RTS from being open to theistic evolution as he has defined it.

“I knew the issue of Genesis 1-3 and evolution was emotionally charged, but not this charged,” he wrote.

In his letter, Waltke said he had received a call from the dean of another seminary, which offered him a teaching position there.

Though not identified by name in the letter, the seminary was revealed on Friday by Justin Taylor, editorial director at Crossway and a blogger at Between Two Worlds, to be Knox Theological Seminary in Ft. Lauderdale.

According to Taylor, Knox Theological Seminary is hiring Waltke to teach for their Winter and Spring terms.

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Scientists, Creationists Agree: ‘Sediba’ is No ‘Missing Link’ (Christian Post, 100415)

Two fossils that were discovered in South Africa nearly two years ago are causing a stir today after two articles published recently in the journal Science introduced them as members of a new species that “might help reveal the ancestor” of the genus Homo.

While some – mostly media – have been quick to hail the species as the “missing link,” many more have cast their doubts over the discovery, which some say might not even be a new species.

Some critics further say the find expands the cloud of uncertainty rather than “cast new light,” as Science claimed in its introduction of the papers.

“The origins of the genus Homo remain as murky as ever,” commented Dr. Daniel E. Lieberman, professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard.

“[T]he situation seems to grow more convoluted with each newly unearthed specimen,” added Brian Thomas of the anti-evolution Institute for Creation Research.

As for the authors of the two papers, neither claim the new species, Australopithecus sediba, to be a direct ancestor of modern humans. They, like many in the science community, reject the term “missing link” as it implies a chain in evolution rather than the more widely accepted tree model.

But they do claim that “Sediba” shares more derived features with early Homo species than any other australopith species and thus might help reveal the ancestor of that genus.

“They (the fossils), ladies and gentlemen, are potentially a Rosetta stone into the past,” paleo-anthropologist Lee R. Berger of South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand told reporters during a press conference last Thursday.

Two years ago, it was Berger’s then-nine-year-old son, Matthew, who first stumbled upon a piece of the first skeleton while playing with his dog in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in South Africa.

Matthew’s find led Berger and his team to uncover the rest of the skeleton and another nearby, giving them two skeletons “far more complete than the famous Lucy fossil from Ethiopia” and in “extraordinary condition,” according to Berger.

“What we have found are arguably the most complete early hominid skeletons ever discovered,” he reported.

Amid all the hype, anti-evolution groups are largely, and not surprisingly, unfazed.

“This fossil has been surrounded by the standard overhype we’ve come to expect from those on a campaign to evangelize for Darwin,” commented Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute, the non-profit think tank best known for its advocacy of Intelligent Design.

Furthermore, they have on their side skeptical members of the science community who are just as critical of the conclusions drawn so far – particularly those of the press – as they are.

“[T]he bones have been examined by only one group of scientists, and their interpretation may be challenged dramatically as time passes,” stated apologetics ministry Answers in Genesis, recalling how the “missing link” hype over the fossil “Ida” last year “quickly evaporated.”

“The persistent admission of overall confusion about human evolution … is the real story, tucked beneath the fanfare,” added Thomas from the Institute of Creation Research.

“[T]he fine print in the actual scientific studies reveals that each discovery only adds another layer of confusion and forces another rewrite of evolutionary history,” he stated.

Presently, Berger’s team of researchers are looking to see if any proteins are preserved in one of the skeletons, which they suspect might contain the remnant of the dried brain.

If soft tissue is found, there is a slim chance the researchers could yield DNA that might unlock the genetic code for Sediba.

“We shall wait and see,” said Berger.

Notably, the name “Sediba” means “fountain” or “wellspring” in the seSotho language, spoken in South Africa, and seems fitting to those who believe that the new fossils will provide a wealth of information about our human origins.

Berger and his team of scientists say the newly described fossils date between 1.95 million and 1.78 million years in age.

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Evangelical Prof Resigns After Pro-Evolution Video Row (Christian Post, 100412)

What started as an interview about science and faith, grew to become an increasingly popular web video, and was eventually pulled down at the request of a conservative seminary has now led to the resignation of the professor behind it.

This past week, Reformed Theological Seminary announced that Dr. Bruce Waltke from the RTS Orlando campus was one of three professors who would not be returning to RTS out of the more than 50 on staff.

While the other professors reportedly chose not to commit to another year in order to return to the pastorate and in response to health issues, Waltke was reported as having simply resigned from his position as Professor of Old Testament.

Though not stated, those who watched how events unfolded over the past two weeks believe that the resignation is related to the controversy that ensued following the posting of a video in which the evangelical professor discusses the danger the Church will face if it does not engage with the world around it – in particular with the issue of evolution, which many evangelicals reject.

“And rightly so, because we are not using our gifts and trusting God’s Providence that brought us to this point of our awareness,” the distinguished Old Testament scholar added.

Prior to his resignation – forced or otherwise – Waltke released a “statement of clarification” after being asked by the administration of RTS to request that the video be removed.

In the statement, which RTS reportedly released, Waltke put his comments “in a fuller theological context,” hitting specifically on nine points.

Among the points was confirmation that Adam and Eve are historical figures from whom all humans are descended.

“[T]hey are uniquely created in the image of God and as such are not in continuum with animals,” Waltke stated.

Waltke also stated that evolution as a process “must be clearly distinguished from evolutionism as a philosophy.”

“The latter,” he stated, “is incompatible with orthodox Christian theology.”

Furthermore, Waltke described science as “fallible and subject to revision.”

“As a human and social enterprise, science will always be in flux,” he stated. “My first commitment is to the infallibility (as to its authority) and inerrancy (as to its Source) of Scripture.”

In addition to his statement of clarification, Waltke also released a joint statement with Darrel Falk, president of the BioLogos Foundation, which renowned geneticist Francis Collins founded in 2007 to emphasize the compatibility of Christian faith with scientific discoveries about the origins of the universe and life.

In the statement, the two professors highlighted the differences between them and said that the fact that the video in question generated controversy illustrates why the dialog must continue.

“It is absolutely essential that we not give up just because missteps will occur,” they stated. “We must not be discouraged. Let the conversation continue, but only if it can be done in love and mutual respect and in a way that draws the next generation even closer to the Lord Jesus Christ who joins us all on our road to Emmaus.”

Despite the flurry of activity since the posting of Waltke’s first interview on March 24, the Old Testament professor was apparently unable to find a “remedy to his predicament,” as BioLogos put it.

“The fact that Dr. Waltke felt he was unable to leave the video in place, despite the fact that he still agrees with its contents, is an extremely important statement about the culture of fear within evangelicalism in today’s world,” the foundation reported prior to learning of the professor’s resignation. “Leading evangelicals who support evolution are rightly fearful of personal attacks on the integrity of their faith and character. Even when they believe that scientific data must be taken seriously, and that science has revealed the ways in which God created the world, they are more willing to be associated with those who are clearly wrong about God’s truth as revealed within His World, and who are thereby also wrong about how they understand His Word.

“How will the Church ever come to discern truth and falsehood if academic discourse is neutered for fears of public perception?” BioLogos posed.

During the time Waltke taught at RTS, the Reformed institution hailed him as a preeminent Old Testament scholar and a “master teacher with a pastoral heart.”

In addition to RTS, Waltke has taught at Dallas Theological Seminary, Regent College, and Westminster Theological Seminary. Waltke has also served on the translation committee of the New International Version (NIV) Bible and the Today’s New International Version (TNIV) Bible and served as editor of the Spirit of the Reformation Study Bible.

When it comes to publications, Waltke has written commentaries on Genesis, Proverbs, and Micah. His latest publication, An Old Testament Theology: An Exegetical, Canonical and Thematic Approach, earned the Christian Book Award in 2008.

Waltke presently holds doctorates from Dallas Theological Seminary (Th.D.), Harvard University (Ph.D.), and Houghton College (D. Litt.).

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The Moral Life of Babies (and the Ideological Life of Adults) (Albert Mohler, 100510)

The New York Times Magazine is often the most interesting section of each Sunday’s edition, and often the most controversial as well. The May 9, 2010 edition of the magazine certainly proves the point with its cover article, “The Moral Life of Babies.”

The article takes readers into the baby lab, officially known as the “Infant Cognition Center” at Yale University, where researchers are attempting to answer this question: Are babies born with a basic moral sense, or are they, in effect, blank slates?

The article is written by Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, who leads the research there, along with his wife, Karen Wynn, and lead author Kiley Hamlin. “We are one of a handful of research teams around the world exploring the moral life of babies,” Bloom explains.

Bloom and his associates believe they have documented the fact that babies do have a very clear sense of right and wrong from very early stages. This runs counter to much of what has been assumed about infants and toddlers. Jean-Jacques Rousseau did indeed call the baby “a perfect idiot,” implying that the human infant knows virtually nothing. William James, among whose achievements was the founding of the study of psychology at Harvard, summarized the infant’s mental state as “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.”

Bloom argues otherwise, claiming that new research indicates that babies have powers of moral reasoning that can be traced and measured. How? The problem, of course, is that babies cannot use language to communicate. Instead, Bloom and his team measure “looking time” as the means of determining an infant’s thought and state of mind. As he explains, “The eyes are a window to the baby’s soul. As adults do, when babies see something that they find interesting or surprising, they tend to look at it longer than they would at something they find uninteresting or expected. And when given a choice between two things to look at, babies usually opt to look at the more pleasing thing.”

Put simply, using this research methodology Bloom believes that babies can be shown to prefer a character (or puppet) who acts rightly rather than one who acts wrongly. In sum:

All of this research, taken together, supports a general picture of baby morality. It’s even possible, as a thought experiment, to ask what it would be like to see the world in the moral terms that a baby does. Babies probably have no conscious access to moral notions, no idea why certain acts are good or bad. They respond on a gut level. Indeed, if you watch the older babies during the experiments, they don’t act like impassive judges — they tend to smile and clap during good events and frown, shake their heads and look sad during the naughty events (remember the toddler who smacked the bad puppet). The babies’ experiences might be cognitively empty but emotionally intense, replete with strong feelings and strong desires.

These findings are truly interesting. Taken at face value, they indicate that babies have a very rudimentary innate moral sense — a sense of right and wrong — that they have not learned. They do not know why an act is right or wrong, but they have a sense that right is right and wrong is wrong. In other words, their moral reasoning is at a “gut level.” Further, their moral judgments “might be cognitively empty but emotionally intense.”

Before dismissing that last statement as relating only to infants, consider the extent to which many adults rarely move above this “gut level” moral reasoning. For many adults, the moral sense is relatively empty, cognitively speaking, but intensely emotional.

Throughout the essay, Bloom inserts evolutionary theory into the question. He asserts at the beginning of the essay that the research raises fundamental questions about “how biological evolution and cultural experience conspire to shape human nature.” Then, at virtually every turn in his argument, he inserts evolutionary theory again and again.

Why? Well, he is playing intellectual defense for evolution, for one thing. At first glance, a finding of a developed moral sense among human infants does not appear to be explainable by evolutionary theory alone. Indeed, Bloom admits that, if babies were found to be altruistic toward people outside their own group, evolution would not be a sufficient explanation. He writes:

The morality of contemporary humans really does outstrip what evolution could possibly have endowed us with; moral actions are often of a sort that have no plausible relation to our reproductive success and don’t appear to be accidental byproducts of evolved adaptations. . . . We possess abstract moral notions of equality and freedom for all; we see racism and sexism as evil; we reject slavery and genocide; we try to love our enemies. Of course, our actions typically fall short, often far short, of our moral principles, but these principles do shape, in a substantial way, the world that we live in. It makes sense then to marvel at the extent of our moral insight and to reject the notion that it can be explained in the language of natural selection. If this higher morality or higher altruism were found in babies, the case for divine creation would get just a bit stronger.

But, he insists, higher altruism “is not present in babies.” According to Bloom’s theorizing, cultural learning must provide that higher level of moral knowledge and reasoning.

Bloom’s article in The New York Times Magazine is truly interesting. At the same time, there are two huge questions of methodology that cannot be avoided. The first is the legitimacy of using “looking time” as an adequate measure of infant thinking. This is a massive assumption. The second methodological problem is the definition of morality. As Nadja Reissland, a behavioral psychologist at Durham University, told The Sunday Times [London], “Everything hinges on who decides what is moral. By saying pushing the ball up the hill is helpful, the researchers are making a moral judgment. The babies might just prefer to see things go up rather than down.”

Most interestingly, Bloom and his research team are highly committed to evolutionary explanations. They recognize that the discovery of a moral sense within infants is dangerous to evolutionary theory. In the end, they leave themselves open to the charge that they have simply and arbitrarily defined the moral sense of infants in a manner that preserves evolutionary theory and minimizes negative impact. But, give them credit for seeing and acknowledging the problem.

In the end, Christians should look to this research with a very different set of questions. The most important of these questions is this: Does the fact that infants have an innate moral sense underline the importance of the fact that human beings are made in God’s own image? It would certainly seem so. Indeed, Christians should expect to find something very much like this, based on the teachings of Scriptu re. It is God who made us to be moral creatures, and it is the Creator who gives his human creatures the power and accountability of moral knowledge.

Consider this testimony:

But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying out in the temple, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” they were indignant, and they said to him, “Do you hear what these are saying?” And Jesus said to them, “Yes; have you never read, “‘Out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise’?” [Matthew 21:15-16, ESV]

Out of the mouths of infants . . . and perhaps out of their “looking time” as well.

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Christian Biochemist: First ‘Synthetic Cell’ Strengthens Case for Design (Christian Post, 100525)

A biochemistry expert at the science-faith think tank Reasons to Believe is among those hailing the recent creation of the first-ever “synthetic cell,” though not for the same reasons as most.

“From an apologetics standpoint, this is exciting work that I’m happy to see pursued and would like to see even more effort devoted toward this because it’s giving us a very powerful case for [Intelligent] Design,” said Dr. Fazle Rana on Friday, referring to the idea that holds certain aspects of nature are so complex that they could not have come about by evolution alone but instead point to an intelligent designer.

“In fact, I even would go so far as to say that this is even a brand new class of arguments for Design,” he added during RTB’s flagship podcast.

On Thursday, a group of scientists announced that it had successfully replaced all of the natural DNA inside a cell with laboratory-synthesized DNA, creating the first-ever “synthetic cell.”

The team, led by Craig Venter of the J. Craig Venter Institute, presented its findings in an article published on the website of the journal Science, run by the non-profit American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

In the study, the scientists explained how they synthesized the genome of the bacterium Mycoplasm mycoides with four bottles of chemicals and transplanted it into another type of bacteria, Mycoplasm capricolum, which is closely related to M. mycoides.

“This is the first synthetic cell that’s been made,” said Venter, calling the cell synthetic because it was completely derived from a synthetic chromosome created on a chemical synthesizer with information in a computer.

“This becomes a very powerful tool for trying to design what we want biology to do,” Venter added. “We have a wide range of applications [in mind].”

In his comments Friday, Rana similarly noted that the applications are “limitless” as is “the potential for good.”

But the Christian biochemist seemed more excited about the new set of arguments that have been made available to Design proponents through advances such Venter’s.

“This is a third approach that says, ‘We think that life is the work of a designer because we know from empirical experience now that to make life requires ingenuity, careful planning, careful manipulation of chemicals in the lab under exacting conditions in order to generate lifeforms,’” Rana said.

“I think it shows conclusively in the most compelling way possible that life requires a mind,” he added.

As for fears that bioterrorists could get a hold of the new methodology and do something damaging with it, Rana said such a possibility “is a long way off.”

“To get this to work is so non-trivial. I can’t imagine somebody in their garage cooking up a dangerous organism,” he stated.

Others in the faith community, however, are not so confident.

While the announcement by Venter’s team raised the prospect of a number of benefits, such as the ability to accelerate vaccine development, it also raised potential societal and ethical concerns.

“Pretending to be God and parroting His power of creation is an enormous risk that can plunge men into a barbarity,” Bishop Domenico Mogavero told Italian newspaper La Stampa, adding that scientists “should never forget that there is only one creator: God.”

Monsignor Rino Fisichella, head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, meanwhile told The Associated Press that recently revealed work was a “great scientific discovery.”

“If we ascertain that it is for the good of all, of the environment and man in it, we’ll keep the same judgment,” he said.

But Fisichella added, “If, on the other hand, the use of this discovery should turn against the dignity of and respect for human life, then our judgment would change.”

Presently, aside from working on ways to speed up vaccine production, researchers are planning to design algae that can capture carbon dioxide and make new hydrocarbons that could go into refineries. Making new chemicals or food ingredients and cleaning up water are other possible benefits, according to Venter.

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The Predicament - Francis Collins, Human Embryos, Evolution, and the Sanctity of Human Life (Christian Post, 100903)

By R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

Francis Collins stands at the very summit of the scientific community. He successfully led the massive effort to map the entire human genome, bringing the project to completion ahead of time and under budget. He now serves as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), having been nominated by President Barack Obama last summer. He oversees one of the largest research budgets in the world and, armed with a Ph.D., a medical degree, and a long list of accomplishments, is one of the most influential scientists of the last 100 years.

Thus, you might think that the scientific world would have celebrated the elevation of Dr. Collins to the NIH. Not so. Harvard’s Steven Pinker declared that Collins is “an advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs.” Other leading scientists said far worse. Why?

As The New Yorker reports this week, Dr. Collins is “a believing Christian.” As writer Peter J. Boyer explains, “The objection to Collins was his faith-or, at least, the ardency of it. Collins is a believing Christian, which places him in the minority among his peers in the National Academy of Science. (Of its members, according to a study, only 7% believe in God.)”

Putting “believing” in front of “Christian” points directly to the problem. The voices of secular scientism would be much less threatened by an unbelieving Christian - a person who would associate with Christianity, but hold to no distinctive Christian beliefs. Even more striking in Boyer’s account is the linkage of “ardency” with “believing Christian.” It evidently doesn’t take much to be considered ardent these days.

Boyer points to the influence Collins has achieved through his books, speaking, and advocacy, and to his creation of the BioLogos website, designed “to advance his idea of the companionability of reason and faith.” Of course, the main preoccupation (or obsession) of the BioLogos site is advocacy for the theory of evolution among Christians.

Francis Collins is headed into a public controversy over the use of human embryos in medical research. As Boyer explains, Collins had crafted a policy that would reverse some limitations placed on such research by the Bush administration. The Bush policy, announced during President Bush’s first address to be televised from the Oval Office, limited federally funded research to a specified list of existing stem-cell lines taken from embryos and prevented any funding of research that would destroy further human embryos. Back in 1995, Congress had approved legislation [the Dickey-Wicker amendment] that banned federal involvement in any research that included the destruction of human embryos. Researchers demanded additional stem-cell lines, and some politicians promised that cures and treatments for devastating diseases would be right around the corner.

President Obama modified the Bush policy in 2009, with assistance from Francis Collins. Collins now appears to be a forceful advocate of an aggressive broadening of research using human embryos. “It’s time to accelerate human-embryonic-stem-cell research,” he said, “not throw on the brakes.”

Peter Boyer capably traces the issue and its controversies. Even James Thompson, the University of Wisconsin scientist who pioneered the use of human embryos in this research, saw this clearly. “If human-embryonic-stem-cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough,” he said.

Boyer reports that Francis Collins “was personally torn by the ethical questions posed by stem-cell research” before joining the Obama administration. Nevertheless, he is now pushing hard for the expansion of such research. As Boyer explains:

He has long opposed the creation of embryos for the purpose of research. He sees a human embryo as a potential life, though he thinks that it is not possible scientifically to settle precisely when life begins. But Collins also feels it is morally wasteful not to take advantage of the hundreds of thousands of embryos created for in-vitro fertilization that ultimately are disposed of anyway. These embryos are doomed, but they can help aid disease research.

This is a very troubling passage. Defining a human embryo as merely “potential life” is an evasion, especially when the same person says that is impossible “scientifically to settle precisely when life begins.” A closer look at that statement will reveal that, once it is denied that life begins at conception, there is no real scientific answer to the question of when life does begin. An affirmation of the sanctity and dignity of every human life requires unequivocal opposition to any harmful use of a human embryo.

Furthermore, the argument that existing human embryos should be destroyed in the name of scientific research because they are “doomed” anyway fails on multiple counts. Its horrifying pragmatism would allow the use of any “doomed” human being for medical research or destruction. The argument also fails to acknowledge the moral connection between the embryo and respect for human life, regardless of the reason it was brought into being.

All this takes on a powerful meaning in light of a judge’s recent decision that the Obama administration’s policy violates the Dickey-Wicker amendment, and thus the will of the Congress. The Obama administration has pledged to appeal the decision handed down by Judge Royce C. Lamberth on August 23. Regardless of how that process eventually ends, the Obama administration - and Dr. Francis Collins in particular - will be on the hot seat, crafting a new policy.

The main thrust of Boyer’s essay in The New Yorker is the difficulty of this task. But there is more to the story, for Boyer asserts that Collins’ policy - the one struck down by Judge Lamberth - had “resolved the stem-cell debate.” Clearly, this assumption was and is way off the mark.

The use of stem cells in medical research and treatment is not ethically suspect, unless the cells were derived unethically - as is always the case when a human embryo is destroyed in the process. The most promising avenues of stem-cell research are using cells derived from adult cells, not from embryos. The absolute determination of some researchers to destroy human embryos cannot be explained by scientific determination alone.

Francis Collins will indeed have his hands full as he attempts to resolve this issue and craft another workable policy for the nation. But so long as he remains committed to the use of human embryos in medical research - and to the argument that there are “doomed” embryos that should not be wasted - he will serve to undermine human dignity and the sanctity of human life.

One additional aspect of Boyer’s important essay is worthy of note. Even with all of Francis Collins’ achievements, qualifications, and experience, the bare fact that he is a “believing Christian” is enough to draw the active opposition of many in the scientific establishment. Just being a “believing Christian” is reason enough for suspicion, condescension, and opposition from many. Even when Francis Collins presses his case for evolution, he is dismissed by many scientists simply because he believes in God.

In other words, when we are told that we have to accept and embrace the theory of evolution in order to escape being considered intellectually backward, remember the opposition to Francis Collins. It just doesn’t work. When Collins’ elevation to the NIH post was announced, evolutionary scientist P. Z. Myers lamented, “I don’t want American science to be represented by a clown.”

This is the predicament of those who argue that evangelicals must accept some form of theistic evolution - the guardians of evolution still consider them clowns.

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On Darwin and Darwinism: A Letter to Professor Giberson (Christian Post, 100826)

By R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

An open letter to Professor Karl Giberson, in answer to his posting, “How Darwin Sustains My Baptist Search for Truth.”

Dear Professor Giberson:

I read with interest your posting at The Huffington Post, brought to my attention by friends. I will respond by means of this open letter, though your tone and chosen forum are not indicative of any serious desire for an honest exchange. Your choice of a secular website, well known for its more liberal leanings, is quite a statement in itself. Did you write this in order to gain the favorable attention of the readers at The Huffington Post? If so, presumably you have your reward. But your tone - hardly the tone of a serious scholar or scientist - is even more disappointing.

You make quite a shocking list of accusations. You suggest that I do not “seem to care about the truth” and that I seem “quite content to make stuff up when it serves [my] purpose.” Those are not insignificant charges. You say that I “made false statements about [Charles] Darwin.” I would not want to do that, so I have once again looked carefully at the evidence.

I have read your posting several times, and it seems that your central complaint comes down to one or possibly two sentences in my address to the 2010 Ligonier Ministries National Conference. Indeed, you provide a link to the transcript of my address that was posted at the BioLogos site. You point to this section of my address: “Darwin did not embark upon the Beagle having no preconceptions of what exactly he was looking for or having no theory of how life emerged in all of its diversity, fecundity, and specialization. Darwin left on his expedition to prove the theory of evolution.”

You complain that this was a misrepresentation of Darwin, and you answer that with considerable bombast. In your words: “Of course, Mohler may simply have made a mistake. He is, after all, a theologian and not a historian. He could have gotten this wrong idea from any number of his fellow anti-Darwinians. However, I don’t think so. In his address he read from my book Saving Darwin, in which I took some pains to correct the all-too-common misrepresentation of Darwin he presented. So, unless he was just cherry-picking ideas from my book that he wanted to assault, he should have known better. But let us bend over backwards here and give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps his only real encounter with Saving Darwin was an instruction to an assistant to ‘find something in Giberson’s book that I can ridicule in my speech.’”

No, I can assure you that my encounter with Saving Darwin comes through reading the book quite thoroughly and more than once. You are at great pains to present an understanding of Darwin that will appeal to conservative Christians who are committed to biblical Christianity. You have a great challenge in this respect, and I seriously doubt you will make much headway. You are determined to convince biblical Christians to accept evolution. I seriously doubt you will make much progress through your book.

In making my argument, I did not need to “cherry-pick” ideas from your book. Nor do I need to misrepresent Darwin and his views. I would be most interested and concerned to find that I have in any way misquoted or misrepresented you. I am confident that your larger problem with the Christian public is in being understood, rather than in being misunderstood. You are straightforward in your celebration of evolution, and you utterly fail to demonstrate how an embrace of evolution can be reconciled with biblical Christianity. Your rejection of an historical Adam and Eve is one precise point at which the Gospel of Christ is undermined, and your proposed “new and better way to understand the origins of sin” is incompatible with the Bible’s clear teaching.

The theory of evolution is incompatible with the Gospel of Jesus Christ even as it is in direct conflict with any faithful reading of the Scriptures. Darwin’s historic role in the development of evolutionary theory is central and significant, but the theological objections to evolution are not centered in the person of Darwin, but in the structure and implications of his theory of natural selection.

But, given the specific nature of your complaint, I now cite the larger context of the statement from the provided transcript of my Ligonier address:

The second great challenge was the emergence of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Coming at the midpoint of the 19th century, we need to be reminded that Darwin was not the first evolutionist. We need to be reminded that Darwin did not embark upon the Beagle having no preconceptions of what exactly he was looking for or having no theory of how life emerged in all of its diversity, fecundity, and specialization. Darwin left on his expedition to prove the theory of evolution. A theory that was based upon the fossil record and other inferences had already been able to take the hold of some in Western civilization. The dawn of the theory of evolution presents a direct challenge to the traditional interpretation of Genesis and, as we shall see, to much more.

You cannot possibly disagree with any sentence of this paragraph, save one. Darwin was certainly not the first evolutionist. His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a well-known evolutionist long before Charles Darwin set foot aboard the Beagle. One difficulty here, of course, is the word “evolution,” which was not even Charles Darwin’s preferred word. In any event, evolutionary ideas were already present within Victorian society in Britain, even if it would be left to Charles Darwin to develop the theory of natural selection. I do not deny the intellectual impact of Darwin’s own theory. Evolution is not often known as “Darwinism” by accident.

The one sentence central to your complaint is this: “Darwin left on his expedition to prove the theory of evolution.” Upon further reflection, I would accept that this statement appears to misrepresent to some degree Darwin’s intellectual shifts before and during his experience on the Beagle. At the same time, the intellectual context of Darwin’s times (and of his own family, in particular) leave no room to deny that some form of developmentalism had to be in the background of his own thinking, presumably consistent with his own acceptance of a natural theology and an argument from design. Long before Charles Darwin reached adulthood, his own grandfather had affirmed the “natural ascent” of all life. I am happy to correct any misrepresentation of Charles Darwin’s intellectual ambitions, but that sentence has no consequential bearing upon my larger argument or on my rejection of Darwinism.

And if a misrepresentation of Charles Darwin is the central issue, I must insist that it is you who offers the truly dangerous misrepresentation. In Saving Darwin, you attempt at great lengths to present Charles Darwin as a rather conventional and orthodox Christian, prior to his later loss of faith. You state that he was “born to a well-to-do British family who, despite having some unorthodox characters listed in the family Bible, raised him in the Anglican Church, educated him in an Anglican school, and put him on the train to Edinburgh to study medicine.”

This hardly seems adequate or straightforward. The “some unorthodox characters listed in the family Bible” included both his father and his paternal grandfather. His mother’s family was Unitarian in belief, rejecting the deity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity. Even as Charles Darwin was nominally involved in the Anglican Church, largely through the influence of his sister and brother-in-law after the death of his mother, his involvement and exposure appears to me largely incidental to his life. He later married a woman of Unitarian convictions as well.

It is certainly true that Charles Darwin was directed to become an Anglican clergyman by his unbelieving father, but this was a social tradition for second sons of the developing British middle class. As Randal Keynes, Darwin’s own great-great-grandson explains, “His idea was to become a country parson, caring for his parishioners but living for natural history.” And, as the authoritative biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore recount, “Dr. Darwin, a confirmed freethinker, was sensible and shrewd. He had only to look around him, recall the vicarages he had visited, [and] ponder the country parsons he entertained at home. One did not have to be a believer to see that an aimless son with a penchant for field sports would fit in nicely. Was the church not a haven for dullards and dawdlers, the last resort of spendthrifts? What calling but the highest for those whose sense of calling was nil?”

Of far greater concern is your tendency to appear to agree with some of Darwin’s complaints against biblical Christianity. You claim that he “boarded the Beagle with his childhood Christian faith intact,” but then add, “although he had begun to wonder about the historicity of the more fanciful Old Testament stories, like the Tower of Babel.” This is insignificant? Are we to understand that you, too, see that biblical account as “fanciful”? You explain that Darwin, “like most thoughtful believers,” began to distance himself from the doctrine of hell - a doctrine you describe as “a secondary doctrine that even many conservatives reject.”

If your intention in Saving Darwin is to show “how to be a Christian and believe in evolution,” what you have actually succeeded in doing is to show how much doctrine Christianity has to surrender in order to accommodate itself to evolution. In doing this, you and your colleagues at BioLogos are actually doing us all a great service. You are showing us what the acceptance of evolution actually costs, in terms of theological concessions.

I stand by my address in full, and only wish I had been able to address these issues at even greater length in that context. I plan to do that over the next few months. I greatly regret that you have committed yourself to a cause that I can see as incompatible with the Scripture and destructive to the Christian faith.

Sincerely,

R. Albert Mohler, Jr., President

Joseph Emerson Brown Professor of Christian Theology

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

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Morality and Monkey Business: Evolutionary Psychology (Christian Post, 100907)

By Chuck Colson

Earlier this month, Harvard’s Standing Committee on Professional Conduct found professor Marc Hauser, a leader in the field of evolutionary psychology, guilty of “scientific misconduct.”

The finding followed a three-year investigation into allegations Hauser had fudged his data on the cognitive abilities of cotton-top tamarins. Those are monkeys. That may sound obscure, but the goal of Hauser’s research was to develop a “science of morality” or, more accurately, a philosophy masquerading as a science.

For the past few decades, evolutionary psychology has been one of the hottest fields in science. Every time you read a newspaper, a magazine or listen to the radio, there’s a good chance you will run across a story purporting to explain modern human behavior in Darwinian terms.

The “Holy Grail” of such explanations is the attempt to explain human altruism. When the late philosopher Michael Stove called evolution a “ridiculous slander to human beings,” he had our capacity for kindness, generosity, and other moral conduct in mind. It’s Darwinism’s commitment to survival of the fittest that can’t explain this most essential part of being human-caring for others.

So Hauser’s goal was to explain morality in purely evolutionary terms. Since man’s being created in the image of God couldn’t be the explanation, the answer must lie in our evolutionary past.

Unfortunately for Hauser, there are no early modern humans available for study. So, he decided to look for the answer in monkeys. As Eric Felten details in a marvelous Wall Street Journal article, Hauser produced “a prodigious body of work” that Hauser claimed was filled with “exciting new discoveries” and “rich prospects.”

Except it was a lie. Hauser is accused of cooking the books and, in the process, has brought his entire field into disrepute. Felten points out that primatologist Frans de Waal called the consequences of Hauser’s misconduct “disastrous” for evolutionary psychology.

While Hauser’s misconduct should surprise us, his inability to find evidence supporting his belief that altruism and morality have an evolutionary basis should not.

Felten cites psychologist Christopher Ryan, whose own book, Sex at Dawn, incorporates insights from evolutionary psychology. Ryan summed up its limits succinctly in Psychology Today. According to Ryan, “many of the most prominent voices in the field are less scientists than political philosophers.”

In short, evolutionary psychology is a philosophy in search of data. And without actual evidence, all that people like Hauser are left with are unsubstantiated propositions that are contradicted by millennia of human experience.

The discrediting of Hauser’s work leaves Darwinism and evolutionary psychology without an explanation for altruism and self-sacrifice–the very qualities that distinguish us from the rest of creation.

Hauser was right about one thing. He found a part of the brain that processes moral thought. He fudged the data, however, to make it look like it evolved. But there’s a far more plausible explanation. The truth is written on the human heart, just as Scripture teaches.

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Goldilocks Planet Raises Question: Does Water Presume Life? (Christian Post, 101004)

Christian Scholars Say Life Needs Much More than Water to Begin

A team of planet hunters announced this past week the discovery of an “Earth-sized” planet that it said could be “potentially habitable” though one side of the planet is perpetually night and always freezing cold and the other side is perpetually day and always blazing hot.

“Our findings offer a very compelling case for a potentially habitable planet,” said Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, who teamed up with astronomers from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Tennessee State University, and the University of Hawaii at Manoa for the search.

“The fact that we were able to detect this planet so quickly and so nearby tells us that planets like this must be really common,” he added.

According to the astronomers, the planet, Gliese 581g, has a mass three to four times that of the Earth and an orbital period of just under 37 days. As the planet is tidally locked to the star it orbits, the side of the planet facing the star is believed to be almost always around 160 degrees while the side facing away is believed to be almost always around 25 degrees below zero.

Still, while the two sides alone might suggest the planet to be unable to sustain life, the team of astronomers say it is on the line between shadow and light that water – and thus life – could exist.

Vogt went as far as to tell the press “that chances for life on this planet are 100%.”

“We had planets on both sides of the habitable zone – one too hot and one too cold – and now we have one in the middle that’s just right,” Vogt said, alluding to the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, from where the “Goldilocks zone” for life was penned.

“Any emerging life forms would have a wide range of stable climates to choose from and to evolve around, depending on their longitude,” he added.

Notably, however, while many experts agree that Gliese 581g could be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered and the first strong case for a potentially habitable one, there are also many who point out that there is much more needed for life to emerge than water.

“There’s a whole slew of conditions that need to be met for life to arise, particularly advanced life,” noted astrophysicist Dr. Jeffrey Zweerink, a research scholar at science-faith think-tank Reasons To Believe.

“It (water)’s a necessary requirement, but what we’re arguing is that the requirements for life are far greater than that,” he added in RTB’s Science News Flash podcast Thursday. “So simply because we find these, jumping to the conclusion that life is going to be there … assumes a whole like more things.”

In Zweerink’s opinion, there may be water on Gliese 581g, but there are not going to be the requirements for life as there are just “a whole lot of problems for this planet.”

In naming a few, Zweerink pointed to the tidal locking, the temperature issue, the magnetic field issue, the planet’s mass, the dense atmosphere, and the plate tectonics that are likely occurring on the planet.

“If your criteria is planets that could have liquid water in some capacity, then yeah, I’m going to expect that we’re going to find a lot of planets like that. That doesn’t surprise me at all,” he said when asked for a response to claims that there could be billions of planets with water on them.

“But again, that’s not the real question,” the astrophysicist added. “The real question is ‘Is liquid water the minimum requirement that life requires and given that requirement that life arises or does life require something much greater?’”

Adding to that, RTB Founder Dr. Hugh Ross noted how “many of these astronomers … are assuming if they’ve got a planet that has water that it’s automatic given that you’re going to have bacteria there.”

“Well, it is if the origin of life is an easy naturalistic step under liquid water conditions. But anyone who has studied origin of life research recognizes that that’s definitely not the case,” he pointed out. Ross and his colleagues assert that there are at least 300 conditions that need to be met for even simple bacteria to exist on a planet and at least 900 for more advanced forms of life.

That’s not to say, however, that RTB scholars are not excited about the latest discovery. In fact, they are.

Zweerink, for example, noted that Gliese 581g does meet more than just the minimum requirements for life and is like Earth “in a couple of minimal ways.”

“And if we can ever develop the technology to be able to determine ‘Does this planet have life on it?’ or ‘Can we find life signatures?’ that will help us test which of these models is correct,” he added, referring to two models for the origin of life.

One of the models – the more popular one among scientists – supposes that life arises under minimal circumstances while the other suggests that life requires extreme fine tuning of the environment and even divine input to get the whole process started.

“I’m excited about what we’re going to find in the future,” Zweerink noted before pointing out the developments in astronomy over the past 15 years – from when no planets were known outside Earth’s solar system to the now over-500 that are known.

“Now we’re at that place where we’re just beginning to find planets in the habitable zone. Presumably, we’re going to find a lot more in the next 15-20 years, so we’re going to be able to test this a lot more thoroughly,” he added.

That said, RTB is looking forward to hearing more from the team led by UCSC’s Vogt and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

According to team member Nader Haghighipour from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the planet hunting team is keeping tabs on many nearby stars using the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea and collecting more and more data about how the stars are moving.

The astronomers, he reported, expect to find many more planets with potentially Earth-like conditions.

Haghighipour also noted that to learn more about the conditions on these planets would take even bigger telescopes, such as the Thirty Meter Telescope planned for Mauna Kea.

To discover Gliese 581g, the team looked for the tiny changes in the velocity of its star that arise from the gravitational tugs of the orbiting planets. They used 238 separate observations of the star, Gliese 581, taken over a period of 11 years.

While astronomers describe the Gliese 581 system as being relatively nearby, in actuality, the system is about 120 trillion miles away. To get there, it would take several generations by spaceship.

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Poll: 4 in 10 Americans Believe in Creationism (Christian Post, 101220)

A new Gallup poll reveals that 40% of Americans believe in creationism – that is, that God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago.

The statistic marks a slight decrease compared to years past such as in 2008 when 44% reported believing in strict creationism. But Gallup notes that it is the lowest statistic it has ever recorded in the history of asking the question since 1982.

Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans who believe humans evolved over millions of years, without God’s involvement, has crept up from 14% in 2008 to 16% in 2010. Nearly 30 years ago, only 9% believed in “secular evolution.”

Meanwhile, the percentage of those who hold the “theistic evolution” view, that God guided a process by which humans developed over millions of years, has remained steady at 38%.

Americans who attend church regularly are most likely to hold the strict creationist view, with 60% of weekly church attenders saying humans were created in their present form within the last 10,000 years.

Those who attend church almost every week or monthly are more likely to agree with theistic evolution (47%) compared to the other views. And Americans who seldom or never attend church are more likely to say God guided the process of evolution (39%).

The poll, released Friday, also found that views vary by level of education.

Nearly half (49%) of postgraduates agree with theistic evolution and a quarter agree with secular evolution. Among college graduates, 38% believe in theistic evolution and 37% believe in strict creationism.

Americans with some college education and those with just a high school degree or less are most likely to hold the strict creationism view, when compared to those with a higher level of education.

Though the creationist viewpoint has become slightly less popular, overall, Gallup notes that scientists continue to be surprised that four out of 10 Americans hold that viewpoint. And the decreases over the past few decades have been very small.

Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Dec. 10-12, 2010, with a random sample of 1,019 adults, aged 18 and older,

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Creationism Still Advocated in H.S. Biology Classes, Study Finds (Foxnews, 110130)

The majority of high-school biology teachers don’t take a solid stance on evolution with their students, mostly to avoid conflicts, and fewer than 30% of teachers take an adamant pro-evolutionary stance on the topic, a new study finds.

And 13% of these teachers advocate creationism in their classrooms.

“The survey left space for [the teachers] to share their experiences. That’s where we picked up a lot of a sense about how they play to the test and tell students they can figure it out for themselves,” Michael Berkman, co-author of the study with Penn State University colleague Eric Plutzer, told Livescience. “Our general sense is they lack the knowledge and confidence to go in there and teach evolution, which makes them risk-averse.”

Creationists broadly believe God created Earth, its inhabitants, and the universe, with Christian creationists taking a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis in the Bible. However, scientific evidence says evolutionary theory, the idea that all organisms evolved from some common ancestor, by means of natural selection, explain the planet’s diversity of life. Some of the earliest life on Earth dates back to 3.7 billion years ago.

“The implications for us are very concerning, that there are teachers who are not teaching science, who are not teaching some of the core tenants of science,” Francis Eberle, who was not involved in the study and serves as the executive director of the National Science Teachers Association, told LiveScience.

All major federal court cases in the United States over the past 40 years, in which local citizens or others have tried to get creationism (or its more recent rubric Intelligent Design) into the science classrooms, have failed, the researchers pointed out.

Inside the classroom

The data was collected from 926 nationally representative participants in the National Survey of High School Biology Teachers, which polled them on what they taught in the classroom and how much time they spent on each subject. They also noted the teachers’ personal feelings on creationism and evolution.

Only 28% of high-school biology teachers followed the National Research Council and National Academy of Sciences recommendations on teaching evolution, which include citing evidence that evolution occurred and teaching evolution thematically, as a link between various biology topics.

“We say [evolution is] a central idea in biology, but someone can get a biology degree and not take a class in it,” Randy Moore, a science and evolution education specialist in the biology department at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study, told LiveScience. “We let that go in the name of religious freedom.”

In comparison, 13% of the teachers said they “explicitly advocate creationism or intelligent design by spending at least one hour of class time presenting it in a positive light.” These are mostly the same group of teachers (about 14%) who personally reject the idea of evolution and the scientific method, and believe that God created humans on Earth in their present form less than 10,000 years ago. (That 14% included teachers’ personal beliefs, regardless of whether they taught these in the classroom.)

Some of the creationism advocates insisted that they, rather than scientists, were practicing proper science, with a Minnesota teacher commenting, “I don’t teach the theory of evolution in my life science classes, nor do I teach the Big Bang Theory in my [E]arth [S]cience classes.... We do not have time to do something that is at best poor science.”

Others rejected the scientific method as valid for shedding light on the origin of species, with an Illinois teacher responding, “I am always amazed at how evolution and creationism are treated as if they are right or wrong. They are both belief systems that can never be truly or fully proved or discredited.”

Eberle believes that it might be the teacher’s own scientific education that leads to these problems. “We haven’t done a good enough job with making people understand what is science and what isn’t,” he said. “Science doesn’t deal with the human condition, like why we were here. That’s fine to be covering those, but not in the science classroom.”

No stance on evolution

About 60% of the teachers polled didn’t take a direct stance on the subject, dubbed by the authors as the “cautious 60%.”

Based on respondents’ write-in answers, the researchers surmised that many of these cautious teachers toed the line, weakly teaching evolution without explicitly endorsing or denying creationism in order to avoid controversy and questions from both students and parents.

Often, a letter in support of evolution from the principal or the school board is enough to instill confidence in the teachers, Steven Newton, Programs and Policy Director at the National Center for Science Education who was not involved in the study, told LiveScience. “It would be beneficial for there to be more support from the administration, so [teachers] don’t feel out there all alone,” he said.

Typically, the study found, teachers used three tactics to avoid conflict:

* Instead of using evolution to explain relationships and development of species, some teachers explained it only in a molecular and genetic sense;

* Others taught the curriculum so students knew it for the state-wide tests, but didn’t try to convince the kids that evolution was valid;

* And some offered up both evolution and creationism, without pushing for either, letting the students come to their own conclusions.

The researchers found that many of these teachers didn’t have an educational background that instilled confidence in teaching evolution as a scientific fact. “You can take very little science and get a degree and be teaching in high school. The quality of what [students learn] is so dependent on the teacher you get,” Newton said. “It’s almost a random experience; it’s kind of the luck of the draw.”

The study’s authors suggest that states should require all education majors to take a stand-alone evolution course at the university level before they can become science teachers, while school systems should offer follow-up refresher courses for those already teaching. Extra evolution courses would encourage teachers to embrace evolutionary biology, and make it easier to teach confidently, Berkman said.

Others don’t agree that’s the answer. “If someone wants to learn about evolution, it’s not hard to. It’s hardly a science education problem,” Moore said. “Scientists think if teachers just take a class they will accept it, but many simply reject it.”

A strict evolution class may not be possible at many educational institutions, and wouldn’t necessarily enforce the importance of teaching science as an evidence-based subject. “Many schools that focus on educating teachers aren’t research universities and may not have the resources to offer a course on evolution,” Newton said. “The practical reality is we may just need to teach introductory biology in a way that emphasizes the importance of evolution, and that might accomplish the same goal.”

Berkman and Plutzer present a thorough discussion of their research into how evolution is taught in their book, “Evolution, Creationism, and the Battle to Control America’s Classrooms” (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

The study was published Jan. 27 in the journal Science.

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Creation Museum Founder Pens Book to Defend Bible Consistency (Christian Post, 110202)

Does God change His mind? Can all sins be forgiven or are there some that are unforgivable? Why was Rahab praised for lying, when lying is forbidden in the Ten Commandments?

Ken Ham, founder of the Creation Museum, and a team of contributors respond to these questions and more in the new book, Demolishing Supposed Bible Contradictions, which seeks to defend the word of God against faith critics who claim the Bible is contradictory.

“When we think there are contradictions present, we look carefully and understand what Scripture is telling us in light of other passages,” said Roger Patterson, a contributor to the book, to The Christian Post. “Then we can resolve those conflicts very easily.”

Claims of supposed inconsistencies in the Bible, mostly pushed by atheists, have contributed to a rise in the number of young people leaving the faith. Ham and his team hope that their easy-to-read book will help Christians to refute any alleged Bible contradictions.

Many people, noted Ham in the book, buy into the assertion that the Bible is “full of contradictions,” but haven’t bothered to look into the claim for themselves. Ham is also president and CEO of Christian apologetics ministry, Answers in Genesis.

Throughout the book, many alleged contradictions are quickly ruled out when simple logic, context, translational issues or several other considerations are taken into account.

In one chapter titled “Change of Heart,” claims that the immutable nature of a holy and just God contradicts His relenting heart of judgment towards a nation or group are refuted. A notable Scripture from Jonah suggests God’s “change” when He did not bring upon the nation of Nineveh the disaster He had threatened, following the nation’s repentance.

This is rebuked by contributing author Stacia McKeever who notes that “nowhere in Scripture does it indicate that God is not emotive,” but in fact “[His] actions and emotions are often described in terms of human actions and emotions.”

“God’s character does not change. However, He can change how He chooses to respond to an individual or nation’s action.”

What sets this book apart from other apologetics-based ministries and books is the shared view of the writers of a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis.

“The ministry of Answers in Genesis is intent upon the entire Bible as an authority and not just picking and choosing certain parts,” Patterson said. “The events of the flood actually took place and there was actually a Garden of Eden with a real Adam and Eve.”

More than ever, society is questioning the credibility of the Holy Scripture and putting its accuracy under the scope. But Patterson believes that rooted behind attempts to discredit the Bible is a psychological problem of “accepting the truth of God’s word over man’s opinion of things.”

“I think ultimately it goes to the authority that God has over life and every one of His creatures,” he stated. “People want to rebel against that authority.”

“They don’t want to live life according to God’s plan…so they try to discredit the Bible in an attempt to take God off of His throne and place themselves on the throne.”

Patterson, a member of the curriculum development team at Answers in Genesis, is currently working on developing Bible-based curriculum resources including online courses. He often contributes to Answers magazine, web articles, books, and other apologetics resources from the ministry.

Ham recently announced AiG’s support for the Ark Encounter Project, a full-scale Noah’s Ark theme park in northern Kentucky, set to open in 2014.

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Calvin College Professor Claims Administration Not Truthful Over Colleague’s Resignation (Christian Post, 110817)

A Calvin College professor claims that college administrators are being dishonest about the forced resignation of one of his colleagues over issues related to evolution and scriptural interpretation.

In a statement to the Grand Rapids Press, Calvin College, a liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Mich., said that John Schneider, professor of religion at Calvin College for 25 years, “chose to request retirement on terms that reflected his love and respect for the college, the faculty, and the students, and his desire that his scholarship not cause harm or distraction. The college, with appreciation and respect for Professor Schneider’s many contributions and faithful service as a scholar and teacher, agreed to grant such retirement as of June 30, 2011.”

“All of that is false,” Professor Dan Harlow told The Christian Post. Schneider did not leave on amicable terms, as the college is claiming.

The controversy began in the spring of 2009 when The American Scientific Affiliation invited Harlow, Schneider and two other theologians to present their views on the question of whether Adam and Eve really existed, in light of perceived scientific discoveries. Harlow and Schneider took the view that the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden found in Genesis did not really happen as described in Scripture. Rather, they believe stories such as these are best understood as allegories (short moral stories often with animals), rather than an account of historical events.

“If we are going to be Christians with integrity, and use our God-given capacity to think and use our brains, we have to find a way of re-thinking the character and status of Adam and Eve, we have to find a way of rethinking and re-articulating these Christian doctrines of fall and original sin, of salvation through Christ from sin,” Harlow explained.

After the conference, Harlow and Schneider were invited by The American Scientific Affiliation to publish papers in its journal, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, based upon their conference papers. The editor who sent the invitation happened to be Arie Leegwater, professor emeritus at Calvin College.

According to Harlow, for the next year he and Schneider “very carefully and deliberately vetted” their work through the proper channels at Calvin College.

“I gave copies of my paper to be published to the provost, the academic deans, and members of the biology, religion, history, and philosophy faculty, and I got the green light,” Harlow said.

Additionally, Schneider was eligible for a sabbatical in October 2009, shortly after the conference. His sabbatical proposal was basically a condensed version of his conference paper, and it was approved, without controversy, by the college’s top governance committee and the Board of Trustees.

The only top official that did not see Harlow’s and Schneider’s work was Calvin College President Gaylen Byker, who was on a sabbatical at the time.

Harlow and Schneider’s papers were published in September 2010. About the same time, Byker returned from his sabbatical, read the journal, and did not like what Harlow and Schneider had written.

On September 27, 2010, at a Faculty Senate meeting, according to Harlow, Byker publicly accused Harlow and Schneider of violating the confessional statements they agreed to as a condition of their employment, violating the terms of their employment contracts, and violating the processes and procedures for research and publication as detailed in their faculty handbook.

Harlow maintains that he and Schneider followed all the proper procedures and that their positions are consistent with the faith and confessional statements of the college (which are the same as the Christian Reformed Church to which Calvin College belongs).

“When I wrote this article and vetted it at Calvin College, I did not see any inconsistency with the core theological truth claims found in the confessions; in other words, what they intended to teach and what I wrote in my article. The way I read the confessions is that they are intent upon teaching the revealed truth of human sinfulness, of human need for God’s saving grace in Jesus Christ,” Harlow said.

Moreover, Harlow maintains that Byker actually violated the college’s processes and procedures provided by the Board of Trustees when he took his grievances first to the Faculty Senate.

“So in the last year, what our provost and academic deans have been trying to do is to backtrack and clean up the mess that [Byker] created,” Harlow said.

The Board of Trustees cleared Harlow of all wrongdoing in February 2011 after it became clear that he followed all the proper procedures. However, the Board of Trustees, under the influence of the president, decided to pressure Schneider further, according to Harlow.

They demanded that he provide, by a certain date, a formal written account of how his writings are consistent with Christian Reformed Church beliefs. Schneider decided to fight the board and threatened to sue the college. At that point, according to Harlow, the board, not wanting negative publicity, backed off. Schneider’s lawyer negotiated a severance package with the college that included a legally binding gag rule that prevents Schneider and the college from ever talking about the controversy.

“It is an open secret among a huge number of faculty at Calvin that what the administration is saying about his amicable desire to leave is contrary to the truth,” Harlow said.

Steve Matheson, a research biologist at Calvin College, also recently left under mysterious circumstances.

Harlow thinks it could be related to the controversy surrounding him and Schneider. Harlow says he has no idea of what really happened, but “in print and on campus [Matheson] was the most vocal and strident critic of our president, provost and college administration for their botching of this whole affair.” Also, Matheson did not tell anyone, including his closest friends at the college and his department chair, that he was leaving. An academic dean called his department to a meeting and announced that Matheson had left, but provided no explanation.

One of the interesting aspects of this controversy is that Calvin College is not a strictly fundamentalist school. Its science professors take an old earth view of the creation story in Genesis and the college’s own website affirms its belief in the theory of evolution.

Two of the science faculty at Calvin, the husband and wife team of Loren and Deborah Haarsma, published a book called, Origins: A Reformed Look at Creation, Design, and Evolution. The book explains the different ways that Christians have grappled with reconciling scientific discoveries with Scripture. The college’s own website has a description of the book in which it quotes Loren Haarsma, saying, “Francis Collins, who heads up the [Human Genome Project], is an evangelical Christian and he says the data very strongly indicates that humans share common ancestry with other living things. How will we grapple with that as Christians?”

Schneider and Harlow have chosen to follow Haarsma’s suggestion and “grapple with that as Christians,” yet the same college that promotes Haarsma’s book has tried, to some success, to reprimand and censor them.

Harlow worries that Calvin College’s reputation has been seriously harmed because of this controversy. “I think Calvin College is one of the gems of American liberal arts education. It’s the finest Christian liberal arts college in the country. I love our college and it’s mission. I love our students and our faculty,” Harlow said.

Harlow also said that what disturbs him the most is that he works at a Christian college, but the administration is not behaving Christ-like as they continue to mislead the public about the circumstances surrounding Schneider’s decision to leave, and the extent to which he and Schneider vetted their work before publishing.

“Our administrators are concerned about the reformed Christian identity of Calvin College, but they seem less concerned about Christ’s call to speak the truth because the truth will set you free,” Harlow said, “They’re more concerned about the college’s reputation, constituency, fund-raising and development, all legitimate concerns, but when truth, the truth about faculty members who have been here for decades, takes a backseat to those other legitimate concerns, there is something deeply wrong.”

Calvin College declined a request from The Christian Post for an interview, saying, “We do not comment on personnel matters.”

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