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Intelligent Design at Baylor University

Alas, yet another controversy at my alma mater. I didn't realize the extent of the Baylor connection to Intelligent Design until President Bush ignited the debate and I began to look into what all the fuss was about. Dembski, who was at the center of the Baylor mess, chronicles it here.

In the June issue of The American Spectator, columnist Dan Petterson wrote an article entitled "The Little Engine That Could...Undo Darwinism." It was a needlessly controversial title for a reasonably good summary of the debate from the conservative point of view. [Which is not the same as the "creationist" religious right point of view despite what the left would have you believe.]

In July [or thereabouts] The New Republic, among others. Fired back with "The Case Against Intelligent Design. The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name." The article by Professor Jerry Coyne from the University of Chicago, which is poorly written and drones on for thirty pages making it hard to understand what his point is, seem in the end, merely to make the classic arguments defending Darwin's evolution against creationism, and asserting that Intelligent Design in merely disguised creationism.

Personally, I think this whole thing is really more of a philosophical question that a scientific one. It boils down to what you believe about God and is not really about science:
  • Darwinsim necessitates the belief in the absence of a God in all natural processes including the origin of life itself. And, instead the belief in purely deterministic / naturalistic process such as evolution and natural selection. In other words, life is an accident of nature.
  • Creationism at it's core is the belief that there is a God, and that at some level God created this world and its processes.

Those of us who sincerely believe there is a God but who also believe in science, deeply resent the religious fools who make a mockery of faith in God through their ignorance of science. But we also deeply resent the Naturalist / Darwinists who claim to be saving humanity from false religious teachings when they themselves contend that a religious belief in the absence of God is necessary to correctly teach science.

I think Spinoza almost got it right in 1675. If he had been aware of the nature of the microcosm or the macrocosm as we understand them today with our scientific advancement, he might easily have been an advocate of Intelligent Design. But that's a subject for another day.

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