A timeless argument about creation

Jeff Jacoby wrote in Townhall .... "It is absolutely safe to say," the Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins, a leading Darwinist, has written, "that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane."

And I suspect that many Democrats would say the same thing about the Democratic Party. And they would be just as wrong as Richard Dawkins. People with small minds just can't imagine anyone disagreeing with them.

Liz Craig, a member of the board of Kansas Citizens for Science, summarized her public-relations strategy in February: "Portray them" -- intelligent design advocates -- "in the harshest light possible, as political opportunists, evangelical activists, ignoramuses, breakers of rules, unprincipled bullies, etc."

Again, it sounds like the tactics of the Democratic Party. If you can't provide reasonable arguments against those whose thoughts you oppose, call them names.

Ironically, Charles Darwin himself acknowledged that there could be reasonable challenges to his theory of natural selection -- including challenges from religious quarters. According to the sociologist and historian Rodney Stark, when "The Origin of Species" first appeared in 1859, the Bishop of Oxford published a review in which he acknowledged that natural selection was the source of variations *within* species, but rejected Darwin's claim that evolution could account for the appearance of different species in the first place. Darwin read the review with interest, acknowledging in a letter to a friend that "the bishop makes a very telling case against me."

And the Bishop was right.

How things have changed. When John Scopes went on trial in Tennessee in 1925, religious fundamentalists fought to keep evolution out of the classroom because it was at odds with a literal reading of the Biblical creation story. Today, Darwinian fundamentalists fight to keep the evidence of intelligent design in the diversity of life on earth out of the classroom, because that would be at odds with a strictly materialist view of the world. Eighty years ago, the thought controllers wanted no Darwin; today's thought controllers want only Darwin. In both cases, the dominant attitude is authoritarian and closed-minded -- the opposite of the liberal spirit of inquiry on which good science depends. If intelligent design proponents were peddling Biblical creationism, the hostility aimed at them would make sense. But they aren't. Unlike creationism, which denied the earth's ancient age or that biological forms could evolve over time, intelligent design makes use of generally accepted scientific data and agrees that falsification, not revelation, is the acid test of scientific validity.

Precisely. ID proponents accept completely those aspects (adaption of a species to its environment) of Evolution that can and have been proven, and since the creation of a new species has not been proven, and since it is a Secular Humanist (one particular religion) version of how that happened, ID proponents suggest an alternative approach, which is consistent with the beliefs of many major religions: Christianity, Judiasm, and Islam.

In truth, intelligent design isn't a scientific theory but a restatement of a timeless argument: that the regularity and laws of the natural world imply a higher intelligence -- God, most people would say -- responsible for its design. Intelligent design doesn't argue that evidence of design ends all questions or disproves Darwin. It doesn't make a religious claim. It does say that when such evidence appears, researchers should take it into account, and that the weaknesses in Darwinian theory should be acknowledged as forthrightly as the strengths. That isn't primitivism or Bible-thumping or flying spaghetti. It's science.