"Intelligent Design in Biology: the Current Situation and Future Prospects"

"The goal of the Intelligent Design Movement is to achieve an open philosophy of science that permits consideration of any explanations toward which the evidence may be pointing."

So says Phillip E. Johnson in Think (The Royal Institute of Philosophy). This, to my mind, is the essential crux of this excellent overview of ID's history and purposes. He reviews the conflict, touches briefly on the kinds of evidence of which he speaks, provides some context for how a theist specifically views ID, and points a direction for future development of the ID program.

Another core passage:

"That Darwinist authorities find public scrutiny of their theory so threatening indicates to me that there is a hidden insecurity in their intellectual position which will eventually become so visible it can no longer be concealed. Nowadays I rarely see any attempt to prove that the Darwinian mechanism actually has the power to create major new biological innovations. Instead, the museums and magazines prefer just to tell the story of common descent, assuming that random variation with natural selection (differential reproduction) must have been adequate to perform whatever designing had to be done. At the same time, mainstream science, although guided by Darwinian assumptions, keeps providing more and more evidence of the enormous information content of living structures. Even the core assumption that genetic similarities are necessarily inherited from common ancestors is contradicted almost daily by invocations of something called 'lateral gene transfer' to explain genetic similarities between organisms which are not believed to share a recent common ancestor. Today authoritarian rules ban the hypothesis of intelligent design from scientific discussion and fiercely suppress it by lawsuits. A genuinely confident scientific culture that was making continual progress in confirming its theories and solving problems would not need or want to rely on intimidation to silence dissent. It may require many long years of struggle before the hypothesis of real design in biology will be able to receive a fair hearing, but the day of that fair hearing will arrive, and eventually people may wonder how a materialist theory as shaky as Darwinism was able to captivate so many minds for so long. "

Posted: Wed - February 21, 2007 at 08:08 AM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

"Intelligent Design in Biology: the Current Situation and Future Prospects"

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson