Tommy posted the following earlier and in a private message asked me to respond to the points the columnist made. I did not have time a few days ago but thought it should happen as a favor to him. So here is his original post and my response follows:
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I thought I'd post the enclosed editorial by an Atlanta Scientist in today's Atlanta Journal Consitution. It might be of specific interest to Christians here as he is one too.
Also because it's a hot topic here right now with the debate in the Cobb County School System and the placement of stickers in Science Text Books that stated, "Evolution Science is only a Theory".
Please pay particular attention to the areas in bold and underlined. [tuppence: I did not bold anything either in this copy of his post or in any lf my own material on ID which I posted following, much of which was either colored or bolded to catch my eye when I looked down during a presentation.)
ajc.com > Opinion
GUEST COLUMN
God's reach can't be confined as science
By MIKE D. RUCKER
Published on: 01/21/05
For five Sundays, a visiting teacher in our Sunday school class used a PowerPoint presentation to argue that Genesis, Chapters 1-2, provided a solid scientific explanation of the origin of the universe.
I am a Christian. I am also an engineer (Georgia Tech, 1983). And I am tired of being dumbed-down to by biblical misreadings and interpretations. Since they started their search for evidence to piece together a six-day Creation model, have creationists and intelligent design advocates bothered to look at what God's intent in Genesis might have been?
Let's look at the first two chapters of Genesis.
• In Genesis I, verse 5, "the evening and the morning" are called "the first day" — a "24-hour solar day," according to our visiting teacher. The sun, however, is not created by God until verse 16, the fourth day. An "evening" and a "morning" — even a "day" — makes no sense without the sun.
• Plants appear, too, before the sun has been created. To any elementary school student, the sun is a critical factor in plant growth — remember photosynthesis? Yes, one could argue that God chose to create plants before he created the sun. But why do that? Let the passage speak for itself.
• In Genesis 2, man appears after an explanation that no plants were on the Earth because there was "no man to till the ground." Now what does that mean? Will plants appear only if man is there to tend them? Do plants require man to plant seeds and water the ground? The weeds in my yard say, "No."
These are all problems if Genesis is to be taken as a scientific text. Just as important, however, are the obvious differences between Chapters 1 and 2:
• In Chapter 2, man is created before plants. But in Chapter 1, plants were created before man.
• In Chapter 2, God sees man alone and wants to make a "helper comparable to him." But in Genesis 1, animals are created before man.
What I find most disturbing is that creationists will not admit these problems, instead choosing to force readings on the texts. It makes much more sense to see that what Genesis 1-2 teaches is twofold: God is the creator of everything, and humanity has a special place in that Creation.
When creationists make six-day Creation a basic tenet of the Christian faith — equivalent to Jesus' death and resurrection, they only push the church a little closer to irrelevancy. Christians appear ignorant. And the world rightly looks away from us as a source of answers.
On the Sunday following the last presentation, I was given 10 minutes as a "rebuttal." I brought in three objects for a lesson: a small box, a rock and a hula hoop. I made the lesson simple: God does not need to fit — nor will he — into No. 1; the devil is not hiding under No. 2; and if meanings we try to twist out of Scripture force us to jump through No. 3, then the problem is ours, not God's.
When scientists and science books make the jump from evolution to a conclusion that there is no God, they are venturing outside the realm of their method. I will be first in line to oppose every attempt they make to do this. But I won't do it by twisting Scripture to make claims it never intended to make.
The fear that every other claim the Bible makes must be thrown away if Genesis 1-2 isn't read as a scientific text is unfounded, and has pushed Christians too many times into indefensible positions that harm our true message. There is a valid reading of Genesis 1-2 that does not require us to oppose science or put our heads in the sand. Or jump through hoops.
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Mike D. Rucker lives in Fairburn.
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I’d like to keep my response orderly, for the benefit of my own aging brain, and thus will answer point by point.
1. Rucker brings up the common criticism that there could be no day and night without the sun. This is not true. There can be no day and night without a strong directional light source. From day four on, that source was the sun. Our sun is a first generation star, formed or lit on day four. The book of Job, however, references morning stars, those that ‘sang’ at the beginning of creation. It is an interesting sidenote that astronomy has now come to the conclusion that there are notes, or harmonics, involved in activity of stars.
If we look out into space, we all agree, regardless of how old we think the universe to be, that the further out we look, the further back in time we look. What is interesting about this is that when we look out as far as we can, we see that in the center of every galaxy, associated with its black hole, is a quasar. Quasars are extraordinarily bright – far brighter than the galaxies they are in. The closer we come to our Milky Way Galaxy, and thus the more recent in time, the more we see these quasars fade and then disappear, leaving only the black holes they were associated with. There is no reason to suppose the Milky Way was any different than any other galaxy. We had a quasar in the beginning. THIS was our very strong, directional light source at the beginning. Given the much higher speed of light at the beginning of time, it did not take as much time for that light to get here as it takes the sunlight to get here now.
2. Plants may have appeared before the sun, but they did not appear before the light.
3. Rucker then says:
In Genesis 2, man appears after an explanation that no plants were on the Earth because there was "no man to till the ground." Now what does that mean? Will plants appear only if man is there to tend them? Do plants require man to plant seeds and water the ground? The weeds in my yard say, "No."
It is very important to understand that Genesis 2: 5-6, according to a number of Bible scholars, is a parenthetic probably put in by Moses, for it bears a completely different grammar and syntax from the rest of Genesis 2, and strongly resembles the writings of Moses later. The original text seems to have been “When the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”
Even if that is not the case, it is quite clear that verses 5 and 6 there are a rather rapid explanation of initial conditions: “and no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth and no plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the LORD God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no man to work the ground, but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground.”
The implication of this parenthetic is that it is known that without rain man must work the ground, and irrigate it, for that is the only way crops can grow, or even Rucker’s weeds. Water is necessary one way or another. The author of this part of the passage then explains that the water was seeping up out of the ground itself and it was this that watered the whole earth, implying that this was how the original plants stayed alive. It should be noted here that water does not come upward unless it is under pressure, and that pressure almost always denotes heat. In other words, the interior of the earth was evidently heating up.
4. Because there are not the fine distinctions in paleo Hebrew in terms of verb tenses that we have, it is a common error to think that Genesis 1 and 2 disagree with the order of creation in terms of plants and man. In Genesis 1, plants appear on the third day and man on the sixth. In Genesis 2:8 we read “Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden;” in the NIV. Other earlier versions leave out the ‘had’ before ‘planted’ which could change the meaning. However what Rucker didn’t seem to note in his Christian reading is that, whether or not it was “planted” or “had planted” what was being planted there was only the Garden of Eden, not all creation. Plants clearly precede man in Genesis 1 and there is nothing to disagree with that in Genesis 1.
5. The same problem is with the verb in Genesis 2:19. In Genesis 1, it is clear that the animals arrived before man. In Genesis 2:18, it is clear that God is looking at Adam and says there is not yet a helper comparable or suitable for him. The next verse reads, “Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man…” As in point 4, earlier translations leave out the “had” before “formed”, leaving “formed” ambiguous to the reader. However, the first rule of Biblical exegesis is that Bible explains Bible, so we look to Genesis 1 and find the animals already formed. It is these animals God brings to Noah, the animals He formed. Already.
6. The reason a straightforward reading of Genesis – all of it – is important, is because every major doctrine of Christianity begins there. In addition, every writer of the Bible who references beginnings references Genesis as historical fact. Thus, if you decide Genesis is not what it presents itself to be – historical narrative – then you must also discount others’ references to it, including references by Jesus and Paul and Peter. This makes the Bible nothing more than what any particular person decides he wants it to be rather than God’s Word to man. So yes, a straightforward reading of Genesis is correct and is a rather important part of the Christian faith.
7. All that being said, I do agree with Rucker that Genesis is not a scientific text. It is, however, an historical one, and gives us true history.
Tommy, you also asked about ID in simple terms. Here is my copy of the notes I used for a couple of years when I gave lectures to Christian groups regarding what ID was all about:
Lecture notes: Intelligent Design, What it is and what it isn’t
Why this subject?
1. Confusion with creation
2. Confusion with lack of evangelism
Bridges/ tree
Same function – why is one seen as designed?
1. What criteria is used? – dress, building, gourmet meal
2. We don’t need to know the name or character of the designer to recognize design
3. BUT, design demands a designer exists
4. On the other hand, no design? Why look for a designer?
ID points to theological door – does not walk through
“Here we see intelligent design and here is why” then shuts up
Richard Dawkins famous quote (The Blind Watchmaker): “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed.”
Something else not quoted: first two paragraphs of his preface to this book
This book is written in the conviction that our own existence once presented the greatest of all mysteries, but that it is a mystery no longer because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it, though we shall continue to add footnotes to their solution for awhile yet. I wrote the book because I was surprised that so many people seemed not only unaware of the elegant and beautiful solution to this deepest of problems but, incredibly, in many cases actually unaware that there was a problem in the first place!
The problem is that of complex design. The computer on which I am writing these words has an information storage capacity of about 64 kilobytes…. The computer was consciously designed and deliberately manufactured. The brain with which you are understanding my words is an array of some ten million kiloneurones. Many of these billions of nerve cells have each more than a thousand ‘electric wires’ connecting them to other neurones. Moreover, at the molecular genetic level, every single one of more than a trillion cells in the body contains about a thousand times as much precisely-coded digital information as my entire computer. The complexity of living organisms is matched by the elegant efficiency of their apparent design. If anyone doesn’t agree that this amount of complex design cries out for an explanation, I give up. No, on second thoughts I don’t give up, because one of my aims in the book is to convey something of the sheer wonder of biological complexity to those whose eyes have not been opened to it. But having built up the mystery, my other main aim is to remove it again by explaining the solution.
His answer? Evolution – time, chance, mutations, natural selection – none of these legs hold up alone or together.
Nevertheless – even if it looks designed it isn’t. Evolution happened. How? Why?
Don’t know…. But it happened!
Dawkins’ answer is in title: Blind Watchmaker – reference to William Paley’s book “Natural Theology” – famous argument for design
Stone, watch – no matter broken, rusted, pieces missing – still evidence it was manufactured for a purpose – requires watchmaker.
But for Dawkins and others like him – biological phenomena only LOOK designed – they aren’t really. The watchmaker is blind, so to speak. Evolution has no direction.
no matter the brain is exponentially more complex than the computer
Dawkins admits computer requires intelligence, denies brain does
?? If something LOOKS designed, why not consider the option that it might, indeed, BE designed??
If it waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck….
ID movement exists because of this – but, can design be scientifically detected in the natural realm? Everyone knows this implies the existence of a Designer – but that is not part of ID
If anything in natural world qualifies as intel. Des. – breaks stranglehold of naturalism in science and education.
WEDGE – Phil Johnson
Crit of ID – Paley’s old ‘defeated’ argument
Far from truth – Aristotle – deliberate design in nature
Deliberate requires deliberation = intelligence
Probably not start with Aristotle in world history
What happened?
Among other things – Isaac Newton
Fascination with mathematical, quantifiable solutions
Philosophers like Hume follow suit – if all explanations natural, no need for religion/God.
Once God is eliminated, no reason not to limit science to naturalism and materialism.
Science then had two choices
1. Admit naturalistic scope of science without denying possible supernatural; work with material without denying immaterial.
2. Insist all true knowledge is limited to what science can work with – materialistic, naturalistic
Chose second option.
Add this to Darwin, and naturalism wins the day.
On say-so of science, all truth, facts can be discovered through working with science.
This enters realm of religion. – Michael Ruse has made the accusation in print that Darwinism is now a religion.
Mystery religion – scientists are priests?
Problem: materialistic naturalism is not only counter-intuitive, it goes against our experience as well as our faith – speaking for more than Christians…
ID seeking to solve this problem
not using theology, experience
using math, logic, science -- this is bugging professional Darwinists no end
Because ID is involved with only science, it has definite limits
bulldozer does not build house – it bulldozes
ID movement like bulldozer – plowing through obstruction to science caused by current Darwinian paradigm
Real science does not eliminate possible conclusions before it starts – Darwinianism – naturalism/materialism has done just that
o ID is anathema to them because requires Designer
Fallback position for naturalists is to claim ID is creationism ‘in drag’ – only sneaky theological argument. Therefore ID must be ‘thrown out’
seen from Paley that Designer does not need to be identified
Designer in realm of theology
Evidence of design is not
Declaration of no design other than what is perceived by human mind – design thus becomes entirely subjective -- a product of the human mind.
design thus becomes product of human mind
man replaced God again
it might also be noted that if design is purely subjective, no county office would dare either refuse or grant a building permit on the basis of bad or good design. Yet that is done all the time. ‘Design’ has objective status.
Instead, reality has become a victim of post-modernism – different things for different people.
“Your truth may not be my truth….”
Option – acknowledge reality of design which exists whether we perceive it or not.
objective design
objective intelligence
This is what science is based on – that there is an objective reality that can be tested.
Pearcey’s “Soul of Science” traces history of western science to this very concept within the Christian framework – science as we know it could not have arisen any other way.
Understanding this, then, we can see why the concept of ID is anathema to the materialist/naturalist. The foundation of the one denies the validity of the foundation of the other.
Despite the opposition, ID keeps bulldozing on.
That’s the evolution opposition. What about the creation opposition?
Criticism: not evangelical.
Answer – can’t be.
Criticism: ID is therefore truncated and perhaps somewhat fraudulent.
Answer – bulldozers don’t build houses.
ID points toward the theological door and even leads right up to it – but it will not cross the threshold.
HOWEVER – two leading theorists HAVE crossed threshold in recent books
Phil Johnson, “Wedge of Truth” – logical approach to Christian God in last few chapters.
Bill Dembski, “Intelligent Design, The Bridge Between Science and Theology
In Mere Creation: Science, Faith, and Intelligent Design”, p 29, Dembski lists four goals for ID movement:
Goal Number 1:
A scientific and philosophical critique of naturalism, where the scientific critique identifies the empirical inadequacies of naturalistic evolutionary theories and the philosophical critique demonstrates how naturalism subverts every area of inquiry that it touches.
Goal Number 2:
A positive scientific research program, known as intelligent design, for investigating the effects of intelligent causes.
Goal Number 3:
A cultural movement for systematically rethinking every field of inquiry that has been infected by naturalism, reconceptualizing it in terms of design.
Goal Number 4:
A sustained theological investigation that connects the intelligence inferred by design with the God of Scripture and therewith formulate a coherent theology of nature.
In Wedge of Truth, Phil Johnson explicitely states the ‘external’ goal of ID – to crack open the hold materialistic naturalism has on both science and education. To wedge in the truth, bit by bit, freeing both science and education so people can really learn, and in the process to really think and really question.
Other major players:
1. Michael Behe – Darwin’s Black Box.
Irreducible complexity – certain things could not build up slowly, but had to be complete before they could function as they do now. Things where the lack of them would spell death to the organism.
blood clotting cascade -- chemical feedback loops
flagellum – outboard motor requiring three basic parts (regardless of number of proteins involved in each part)
Design and its Critics conference last year – Ken Miller ‘refuting’ IC of flagellum.
Behe wrong and they could evolve in step-by-step manner
Purely imaginary – no evidence for anything he said changing in real world
Moved proteins around to fit his ideas
What happened to function proteins had before? -- cost of replacement type –
Can’t go monkeying around with a cell and not have consequences – Miller never touched that point.
Luggage rack from radiator in car – build gradually to double decker car.
NOTE: can only use parts from the existing car. No new parts, but you are free to imagine duplication of parts if you like. Consider radiator, though. Take it away and car burns up. Have another in the wings and what do you do with it?
Let you play around with this picture – you will find yourself playing the same ‘what if’ games you hear naturalists play regarding biological systems.
In reality, luggage racks are not made of radiators.
Everything has a consequence. This is the real world.
Venturing bravely deeper into the real world – Jonathan Wells. Icons of Evolution
looks at major illustrations used today to evidence Darwinism and shows how each have been refuted in peer-reviewed scientific literature for many years.
1. peppered moth
2. Urey-Miller experiment and origins of life in general
3. homology
4. embryology
5. ape-man relationship
Wells demands honesty in evolution presentation.
This is causing a lot of negative feedback from the evolution community.
Wells is trying to insert honesty into the teaching of evolution. Never mentions creation or God. -- He himself is, as a result, being accused of fraudulent work and dishonest selection of references.
Other players:
Lee Spetner – Not By Chance
Michael Denton – Evolution, a Theory in Crises
David Berlinski
Paul Nelson
Steve Meyer
Nancy Pearcey
Jody Sjogren
Many others
A percentage of the ID people are not even Christian, let alone YEC – still it is one of the accusations of the opponent to call ID a front for the YEC camp. This, also, is a lie.
I am a YEC. Paul Nelson is YEC. A few others are. We are a distinct minority in the ID camp.
We have reviewed what the ID movement is and what it does.
How does it do it? What methods are used to declare ‘this is the product of intelligent design’ ?
Human world – design vs. non-design
child’s scribbles vs Mona Lisa
what criteria are used to discern difference?
Intentional design vs. unintentional design
wave patterns on the sand, dune patterns in the desert
Tartan designs on a Scottish kilt
What’s the difference, and how can you tell?
Intentional design, vs either non-design or unintentional design involves not only pattern, but plan and purpose. These must be evident to us for us to declare it the product of intelligent design.
just because we cannot discern it does not mean not intelligently designed
some tools appear as just bits of metal. I threw away a chain saw sharpener once and we had to buy another because I did not discern purpose or plan to the thing.
Archaeologists can be confused regarding whether an artifact – say an arrowhead – is designed or simply a naturally chipped stone. Nevertheless, archaeologists don’t give up the ship and go home – they are convinced they can tell intelligent design the great majority of the time. Jobs depend on it!
so false negatives and false positives are no reason to quit the field of study
The reality we can discern we orient our lives around.
--If all reality is only physical – material, then there is no reason to orient our lives to anything BUT the material and physical. We become some sort of epicurean existentialists, indulging ourselves as we please.
But if there is a reality outside of the changing physical world – a Realty that is steadier, higher, deeper, wider, than our physical world and what our physical senses can discover, then there is also a reality we can orient ourselves to (or, in the case of Christ, give ourselves up to) which is steady and meaningful, thereby giving our lives meaning, and a steady foundation.
That was an essentially religious statement of a fact about our existence based on the concept of Intelligent Design.
So how do we discern design? Let’s go back to that.
Unintentional patterns may lead back to laws or probability established by a Designer, but ID does not attempt to deal with that.
ID limits itself to ‘primary’ design. No middle section (laws, chance)
Bill Dembski formalized this with what is now called the Dembski filter
1. Did it happen due to natural law? -- snowflake (caught in first screen)
2. Did it happen because of probability? -- marbles rolled across a floor (caught in second screen)
3. If not, consider intelligent design
Flower
law requiring vegetation cells to produce flower? No.
good chance that vegetation cells will alter enough to produce flower? No.
Does flower show plan, purpose and pattern? Yes.
Good candidate for evidence of intelligent design
Specified Complexity – works with Dembski filter
Complexity
Dembski’s definition – low probability
I prefer more mathematical to avoid accusation of circularity – different parts and interrelationships among them
Increase in complexity
Brain during maturity and learning
Specified -- directed; has a target
no good painting the target after the arrow lands
example – flower – evolve flower – we have something interesting here. What can we do with it?
Flower shows every evidence of being designed for the specific purpose of producing seeds for the plant on which it grows.
Plan, purpose, and pattern
Complex
Specific purpose – withers and falls off when purpose accomplished
Flower not required by any natural law of physics or chemistry
They are not probable outcomes of vegetation cells
The flower then becomes good evidence of intelligent design
not because we feel that way
not because someone in authority told us so
not because we want to believe it
BUT BECAUSE IT PASSED A SET OF PRE-ESTABLISHED SCIENTIFIC CRITERIA WHICH HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH ANY RELIGION OR RELIGIOUS BELIEF ANYWHERE.
And that’s what ID does.
The fact that ID leads back to a Designer is not the business of ID. A bulldozer readies ground for building. He may never know what is going to be built there. It is not his business. Even the fact that SOMETHING will be built there is not his business. His business is to level the ground.
Criticism: if there is a God, then everything is designed and there is nothing to compare design with and therefore ID is unscientific.
Mentioned before – we start with our own world.
teenager’s bedroom – non-design
pile of rocks – non-design
mother in the bedroom when teen has left for college – design
rocks cemented into fountain – design
Intelligent design indicates that the materials at hand have been used to produce something not required in the nature of those materials or by chance; something which has a purpose aside from the natural condition of those materials.
Can we apply this to nature?
It is already done in some ways with nature in biology itself.
genetics – isolate a mouse gene and discover its influence. Maybe related to limb formation
same gene in bear do same thing? Bird? Lizard?
Remember that genes are only strung together chemicals and that the chemicals do not have it in their nature to produce life or limb.
We use what we already have learned and push it to see how far it will take us. This involves the scientific method. ID is doing exactly the same thing with the scientific concept of design. We are using the very criteria used by scientists already and extending them to see how far they can go.
Calling it a front for religion is deceptive or ignorant or both.
This is a quote from an email. – careless and don’t know author. But it states point well:
It seems that in order to have specified complexity, the “specification” must come from common human experiences. In the case of Leplace, we have the common human experience of language. We therefore conclude that if letters make sense and the probability is small that they could have been arranged in their particular order, then the ‘most likely’ explanation is that a human arranged them that way. When it comes to life, it would seem to me we have no way to “specify” the living structures we see, for we do not have within our experience entities that create life.
However, I think this problem fades when we turn from the static arrangement of letters to the dynamic reality of machine-like things. In the case of letters, the significance of arrangement depends on our knowledge of language. But when it comes to machines, the significance of the arrangement does not have this dependence, but instead shows itself in what the machine does. Because the machine will do something regardless of what we already believe or think. And we can figure out what it does.
This then aids in the process of transferring what we see in our own designs to extrapolation into the world of nature. Living organisms are functioning organisms, and thus do not depend on our belief system or even our presuppositions to find sense and meaning in what we see happening.
One more area -- information theory
First definition problem:
1. Shannon – collapsing or compressing repeating sequences of bits in order to facilitate efficient transmission. Meaning was assumed but not required.
same idea as zipping and unzipping files on computer. Zip program does not care about meaning. The directions come from OUTSIDE the program and are imposed upon it.
2. Gitt – “In the Beginning was Information”
information in a biological system is not just bits
meaning necessary
meaning is coded and decodable
meaning can be obeyed by receiver (cell)
directions are internal to the system due to the coding in the DNA
did the chemicals make up their own meaning in the coding? Or was the meaning imposed upon the chemicals by an outside source.
No one argues that DNA does not possess meaning.
Evolutionists claim that information is increased when duplication of a part of the genetic sequence occurs. This is information of the Shannon sort – the addition of extra bits, irregardless of meaning or coding or decodabililty. In some cases this duplication does cause a morphological, or physical, difference. But we have never seen this difference become something other differences build on and thus become a pointer toward evolution. Polyploidy differences seem to be dead ends.
Duplicating bits of bacteria genes will not eventually produce a bear.
New information is required.
Meaningful information, with new directions that the cells can understand.
Thus we have another problem. Decodability.
If the cell cannot decode the new information and obey it, it means nothing.
Therefore the new information evolution requires must not only have meaning, but must have a pre-established receiver capable of decoding and following the directions, not to mention a timing mechanism somewhere to signal the on and off for the expression of the new information.
Given this problem, evolution runs into trouble. According to Dr. John Sanford, the geneticist at Cornell who invented the gene gun, there is no known way for any cell to build a new protein bit by bit so it can be used later. Duplication of proteins is not what he is talking about. He is talking about the process of putting together the incredible sequence of molecules a protein requires in order to be a protein. There is no reason a cell should expend the energy to make a bunch of pieces and then hold on to them for howevermany generations until there were enough to make a protein which may or may not be usable.
This leaves us with not only the fact of meaningful information in the cell to begin with, and how it got there, but with the problems evolution faces when declaring that meaningful information increased by natural means through time to produce all the life forms we see today.
Intelligent Design declares there is a much more simple explanation – the cells, the tissues, the systems, the organisms – were intelligently designed to do what they do.
The complexity of the information found in the genome passes every criteria Intelligent Design can throw at it:
it is not required by natural law
it is, mathematically, not a product of chance, or probability
it is complex
it is specified
it shows plan, purpose, and pattern
Behe’s irreducible complexity simply becomes the frosting on the cake at this point.
Where is ID headed?
In the packet is Phil Johnson’s progress report. Two main webpages are those of the Discovery Center and Access Research Network. You can read more about them in the packet available in the back.
A good point about ID was made in a bit of private correspondence by Ashby Camp, author of a marvelous little book called “The Myth of Natural Origins”
Here’s my two cents on the Intelligent Design movement. It is an eclectic mix of philosophers, theologians, scientists, miscellaneous academicians and laymen that is held together by a common belief that Science has been blinded by a philosophical commitment to naturalism. The immediate goal of the movement is to legitimize within the larger culture debate on the subject of origins. They are challenging the assumption that the story of origins has essentially been solved within a naturalistic framework. If they succeed, it will be nothing short of a cultural revolution.
The method of attack has nothing to do with Scripture (at a formal level) because at this point in our culture Science is considered the ultimate path to truth. Its preeminent position can only be shaken by demonstrating that its putative triumph over religion was actually a piece of naturalistic public relations. If the Science establishment can be forced to acknowledge the scientific case for intelligent design, theism will become part of the ‘Post-Christian’ cultural air. In that philosophical environment, a new set of options will open for people, one of which will be biblical creation.
This is where creation science and creation teaching fit in. We build on the ground ID has leveled for us. It is very hard to build and level at the same time, as many creationists have learned. But when the ground is cleared, it is not too hard to build and pave the pathway to the Cross. Yes, we can do both, but when there is an entire group of people who are ready, willing, and able to take on a major part of the job, they should be welcomed with open arms.
We do need to remember that flat ground is flat ground, however, and just about anyone can build on it. It behooves Christians to be ready to answer questions immediately when asked. We are commanded in the Bible to always be ready to answer for the hope we have within us. Is each of us ready? When the college student who has just had part of his supposed knowledge of the world and its workings stripped away and exposed as false, will we be ready to say, “You are a complex being, and you have a purpose for living. You yourself are evidence of an Intelligent Designer. He is God, and He loves you and created you with your abilities for a reason. You are not an accident. You are on purpose, and God is for real.”
The intelligent design movement will not – cannot – make that speech for us. They can only drive people to ask the questions to which we must be ready to give the answers. They can demolish Darwinism, but they cannot build a new foundation for any life. They can point to the clear implication of the Intelligent Designer, but they cannot, via logic and science, identify Him. That is up to us.
What ID is, is the bulldozer. What ID isn’t, is the builder. But it’s the rare builder who doesn’t appreciate the fellow who leveled the lot.
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Folks, this ends my time here. I have tried to resign privately to the webmaster but he refused. So I am resigning as moderator publicly here and now. The invasion of Meert, Parsons, and the rest does nothing to help anyone anywhere and is a game to them. I tried to battle them for three or four years at CARM. When I was asked to moderate at Baptist Board they followed me there and tried to bring it down. Parsons, who has also gone by “Galatian” and “Barbarian” and other names (Yehren here) is still there, keeping an eye on things and ready to call in the reserves if anything gets too biblical! This group causes confusion wherever they go and are in the habit of taking over forums, as they have done here. They are not here to discuss but to bring it down and/or dominate it. They have done the last here and I have no desire to be part of their garbage again. As far as I am concerned, I truly consider them to be those with the heart of wolves but who nevertheless dress up in sheep’s clothing. They are only here to destroy. I will not be part of that.
Barry and I can be reached via his website at www.setterfield.org
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