Intelligent design goes Ivy League: Cornell offers course despite president denouncing theory

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.

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."

#####IOW, the mere acknowledgment that "God had something to do with how we got here," at least by itself, without significant elaboration, I think takes you almost nowhere toward answering the question of how exactly the "getting here" occurred. There is some connection, especially if you do have an elaborated theological theory about God's relation to the world, but I think the two are for the most part distinct questions.#####

But ultimately there must be a connection or philosophical naturalism is correct.

Most scientists probably don't confuse the two, but the ones that are very active in the evo-crevo wars usually do.

That's not my experience. In fact Dawkins is the only crevo-activist and scientist that comes to mind who is a "scientific atheist". (That is one who argues from science to atheism. Others may happen to be atheists, but without arguing that science, i.e. operational naturalism, is sufficient evidence for atheism.) Can you think of anyone else?

As for creationists confusing the two (operational and philosophical) more than scientists, it depends on which scientists we're talking about. Creationists don't confuse the two any more than most politically active evolutionists.

Again, this is not my experience. The argument that evolution implies atheism, which can only be based, at least in it's usual ipso facto form, on a confusion of operational and philosophical naturalism, is ubiquitous among creationists, both lay creationists and many of those with scientific credentials.

Doesn't theistic evolution confuse operational and philosophical naturalism?

No. I don't see how. In any case I don't think that "theistic evolution" describes a single or specific view. There are many possible and differing ways of reconciling evolution (or any naturalistic theory, or science generally) with theism.

I think you would find that most people, who may not have thought through the problem systematically or philosophically, view the position of "theistic evolution" as recognizing that there's more to creation than science can know or tell; i.e. that the scientific account, even to the extent it may be true and complete in its own terms, is not the full story or the complete truth. Isn't this attitude an acknowledgment, rather than a denial, of the limitations imposed by operational, as opposed to philosophical, naturalism?

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