Why intelligent design will change everything

Last year, the intelligent design movement burst onto the national scene, causing all manner of outrage from the guardians of science and right thinking. All the major media covered this upstart idea challenging Darwinian evolution's theory of the origin of life. Everybody has been piling on, even conservative pundits like George Will and Charles Krauthammer. The cultural elites were appalled when the yahoos on the Kansas Board of Education voted to "teach the controversy" to high-school students. In Dover, Pa., a judge outlawed the mere mention of I.D. theory in school science classes. Like a fierce game of whack-a-mole, wherever I.D.'s politically incorrect head pops up, its opponents rush to smack it back down.

I am enjoying all this tremendously. What makes it so much fun to watch is that so far not one of the critics understands it. Without exception, they simply dismiss I.D. theory as nothing more than stealth religion – creationism by another name. They say that all I.D. does is insert God to explain what science has not yet figured out. While they all lose their collective minds about it, warning darkly that the fundamentalists are coming, support for I.D. theory will continue to grow because it is good science. I want to explain why, so that when you hear the intelligentsia loudly denouncing it, you, too, can have a good laugh. Even better, you will understand why intelligent design theory is going to become a major force for good in the battle to rescue our collapsing culture – because the way we think about origins affects the way we think about nearly everything. (More on that later.)

Meanwhile, the debate rages on, all the while opponents keep insisting there is no debate.

Despite its pretensions to objectivity, science has always been political. That's why scientific revolutions have often met initially with resistance and ridicule, because the old order stands to lose if the new becomes accepted. But the great thing about science is that eventually the weight of evidence breaks through. Think Galileo (opposed not only by the church but by fellow academics), or Lister (ridiculed for disinfecting surgical rooms to prevent infection), or the Wright Brothers (man will never fly). So all this hand wringing about intelligent design is a good sign that the revolution is under way. The old order is being challenged, and they are freaking out.

First, what I.D. theory is not: It is not creationism. Full disclosure here: I am a creationist. As a Christian, I believe God is the author of life. But I.D. theory is a science-driven enterprise. It is not a deduction from Scripture but an inference from observation. It says that the intricate design found in living things and in the universe itself is best explained by an intelligent cause. Darwinism, on the other hand, says that undirected natural processes led life to arise spontaneously; then evolution by natural selection (survival of the fittest) resulted in living things that appear to be designed, but really aren't. The question boils down to this: When considered objectively, where does the evidence actually lead?

Drawing heavily on Nancy Pearcey's great apologetic book "Total Truth," I'm going to focus on two of the most powerful arguments for intelligent design. Her book contains many more. I wish every Christian (and every thinking person) would read her masterful defense of Christianity as total truth about all of reality. But just reading this column will make you far more knowledgeable about I.D. than nearly all of its opponents.

It's true that by far the dominant theory of origins is the evolutionary one. It goes something like this: It all began billions of years ago in some sort of chemical soup (a "warm little pond," as Darwin put it) which, when zapped with an energy source, led to the chance formation of amino acids. These acids somehow self-organized into proteins and then morphed into the first living cell. All living things descended from that first cell, evolving from simple into increasingly complex organisms, all the way up to man.

In Darwin's time this was easier to imagine, because it was thought that cells were mere blobs of protoplasm. It fit in nicely with his idea that life could have first appeared as a simple cell. There's just one problem. We now know that there is no such thing as a "simple" cell. Recent advances in microbiology have demonstrated that the cell is literally a miniature factory town, with its own chemical library containing blueprints that are copied and transported to molecular assembly lines that manufacture everything the cell needs. Nancy Pearcey compares it to "… a large and complex model train layout, with tracks crisscrossing everywhere, its switches and signals perfectly timed so that no trains collide and the cargo reaches its destination precisely when needed."

Just one cell is vastly more complex than anything ever created by human engineering. And your body contains 300 trillion of them, each one "knowing" exactly what it is supposed to do within itself and in relation to all the other cells.

Microbiologist Michael Behe has coined the term "irreducible complexity" to describe this. That is, the cell consists of coordinated, interlocking parts that must all be in place simultaneously, or it won't function at all. You can't improve the cell through one random mutation at a time because if you change any one aspect, the whole thing will crash. For evolutionary change to occur, every single piece of its Rube Goldberg-like factory would have to mutate at exactly the same time, and each single mutation would have to be beneficial, or the cell would just die.

"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."

"An aggregate structure, like a pile of sand, can be built up gradually by simply adding a piece at a time. ... By contrast, an organized structure, like the inside of a computer, is built up according to a pre-existing blueprint."

Since living systems are organized wholes, they had to have been put together in the first place by a pre-existing design.

Darwinists cannot explain irreducible complexity. They keep saying that it poses no problem for evolution, as if repetition would make it so. They insist that just because we don't yet understand how evolution can work in light of this doesn't mean that we won't figure it out eventually. But they will never figure it out, because irreducible complexity makes evolutionary change at the cellular level logically impossible.

(Note: Natural selection clearly occurs within species as an adaptive mechanism. I.D. theory does not deny or even address this, nor does it address the question of whether natural selection could lead to the development of entirely new species. I.D. theory is concerned with the origin of life only.)

Even more powerful evidence comes from the genetic code. DNA is a kind of language consisting of four chemical "letters" that combine into an astonishing variety of sequences to spell out a message. It contains a mind-boggling amount of information. Where did it come from?

Darwinists say that DNA resulted from chance mutations operated on by natural selection. Really? As theologian Norm Geisler quipped:

"If you came into the kitchen and saw the alphabet cereal spilled out on the table, and it spelled out your name and address, would you think the cat knocked the cereal box over?"

In fact, chance events tend to scramble information, like typos in a page of text. Even if some kind of more complex molecule somehow did appear in the supposed chemical soup, the same random processes that produced it would continue to insert "typos," soon scrambling any coherent message that might have occurred. Again, it's not that we don't yet understand how chance could create complex information; it's that in principle this cannot happen.

If chance cannot do it, perhaps some yet-undiscovered physical law can. That's what scientists excited about complexity theory are hoping. They are studying self-organizing structures like snowflakes and crystals, searching for clues to how similar natural processes might also give rise to the complex information found in DNA. But they won't find any.

That prediction stems not from ignorance or hubris, but from the nature of physical laws, which by definition are regular and repeatable. Those properties enable the brilliant engineering students at MIT to enjoy shoving a piano off seven story high Baker House roof every year. They know that gravity makes things fall, every time.

But the information found in DNA is quite different. When you decode one section it tells you nothing about what comes next. The letters are free to combine into an unimaginably vast quantity of information. By contrast, the physical laws being explored in complexity theory are simple instructions, able to create complex patterns but not much information – certainly not enough to account for the fact that each cell in your body contains more information than the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.

This is not at all like saying man will never fly because God didn't give him wings. It's not that I.D. theorists can't imagine how a physical law could create information. It's because in principle, law-like processes cannot generate complex information. Some things really are impossible.

It turns out that life is not primarily about matter, but information. Commenting on the failed attempts to create life in the lab, astrophysicist Paul Davies writes:

"Trying to make life by mixing chemicals in a test tube is like soldering switches and wires in an attempt to produce Windows 98. It won't work because it addresses the problem at the wrong conceptual level."

Common sense tells us that information does not occur without an intelligence to organize it, any more than the hardware of a computer can create its own software. Even scientists know this. Otherwise, how could SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researchers ever hope to distinguish between radio signals generated by some natural process and those sent from the hoped-for aliens? Again, we see that the most plausible explanation for the information in DNA is an Intelligent Designer put it there.

But for Christians, we knew that, didn't we? "In the beginning was the Word (Logos)." Behind everything is the Logic, the Wisdom, the Intelligence of God.

Currently, only a minority of scientists holds to intelligent design theory, but the number is growing. To date, over 400 scientists have signed a document entitled "Scientific Dissent from Darwinism." Many of these scientists are not Christian, and some are outright hostile to it, which is further evidence that I.D. is not religion. A scientific revolution is just beginning, but almost nobody recognizes it, least of all its opponents.

And not a moment too soon, since evolutionary theory did not stay in the scientific realm but oozed into all the sciences, the liberal arts and out into culture, with horribly destructive results. The biblical view of man as a spiritual being created in God's image has been replaced by the view that man is nothing more than a highly evolved animal struggling to survive in a meaningless universe. Scratch any social ill and you will find Darwinism underneath.

One of the worst consequences has been the devaluation of human life. It is no exaggeration to say that Darwinism has led to the killing of untold millions of human beings. To highlight just a few examples: eugenics (philosophical Darwinism) inspired Margaret Sanger to found Planned Parenthood and the pro-abortion movement. Eugenics helped Hitler convince an entire country to follow him in his attempt to wipe out the "inferior" Jews, not to mention the toll in blood it took to stop him. These days Peter Singer, a Princeton professor of bioethics, advocates that parents be allowed to dispatch their imperfect infants up to 30 days after birth. The misguided "right to die" movement is rapidly becoming the "right to kill" movement, as last year we watched severely disabled (but not dying) Terri Schiavo starve to death by court order, while a large portion of the country approved of it. Meanwhile, more than a million babies continue to be aborted every year. None of these horrors could have occurred in a culture that understood each human life to be a unique creation of God, stamped with his image.

Darwinism is also behind the sexual revolution (just doing what comes naturally), radical feminism, family breakdown and normalization of homosexuality (gender roles are social constructs we can discard as we "evolve" as a society). Darwinism removed the foundation for a transcendent moral Truth that stands outside of our personal preference. Now we make it up as we go, "re-imagining" everything. Even many Christians consider their faith to be purely personal. It's "true for me, but maybe not for you." No wonder assertions that Jesus is the only way to God meet with such outrage. And why so-called progressives are deeply offended when Christians try to bring into the public square what they view as nothing more than our particular rabbit's foot. Rejection of God is the root cause of our cultural degradation, but Darwinism has been its indispensable support, giving intellectual cover for all the evil we want to do.

But intelligent design is on the move, and this is a great gift to everyone, especially Christians. It's only a matter of time before it becomes accepted as a legitimate competing theory of origins, and as it does it will unleash enormous changes for good, not only in science but all of culture – because if people understand that there is (or at least could be) a Designer, then we can once more ask, what is the purpose of that design? What are things for?

For example, conservatives and Christians are having a difficult time making the case against homosexual marriage. Thousands of years of exclusively heterosexual marriage mean nothing to those with a Darwinist worldview. Why, they are far more evolved than those benighted cultures in the misty past. To them, tradition is oppressive; destroying it is progress. Why shouldn't people be able to "love" whomever they want? How will it hurt your marriage?

The truth is that homosexual marriage is wrong because it violates God's design and purpose for us, with inevitably negative consequences. But for an exercise in frustration, just try to discuss design with someone steeped in the evolutionary mindset. Point out the functional biological differences between male and female, and they will dodge, deny or change the subject. Press the issue, and they will become angry at your attempt to "impose" your personal values. What they will never do is engage the substance of your argument. They can't. Their worldview will not allow them to admit the obvious.

Multiple research studies documenting the need that children have for a mom and a dad are probably the best defense we've got, but in a nation full of divorced or never married single parents, and with a media quick to promote "gay" families, it's a tough slog. So far, a majority of the public opposes homosexual marriage, but it's mostly instinctive and traditional. People say things like, "I wasn't raised that way." But younger generations, raised on books like "Heather Has Two Mommies" and subjected to Darwinist dogma throughout their schooling, have no tradition left to hold them. And any common-sense instinct they might have to resist faces an incessant cultural onslaught that brands such thoughts as hateful prejudice.

For the older generations, watching defenders of marriage viciously attacked in the press is very confusing. Having never reasoned out something so basic as marriage, they, too, will begin to doubt themselves. Unless something dramatic changes, public opposition will eventually crumble, and we will see the destruction of marriage as one more nail in the cultural coffin we are building for ourselves.

... so far not one of the critics understands it.

We're ignorant. Gotit.

Even better, you will understand why intelligent design theory is going to become a major force for good in the battle to rescue our collapsing culture – because the way we think about origins affects the way we think about nearly everything.

~~God~~ space-aliensDidit and if you don't straighten up and go to church he'll smite thee.

But I.D. theory is a science-driven enterprise.

Judge Smells: "Weellll? ... We're waiting! ..."

... defense of Christianity as total truth about all of reality.

Which explains why the other two thirds of the earth are just figments of our imagination.

And Dr. Behe is wrong.

Darwinists cannot explain irreducible complexity.

Most of the surviving Darwin clan married into the Wedgewood family, but the Wedgewoodists can't explain Santa Claus either. And for the same reason.

Funny. Evolution doesn't address the origin of life. Just the development of new species.
So ID only deals with origin, but not the formation of species; And if evolution doesn't deal with origin, only speciation -- Then what's the friggen problem?!

It is no exaggeration to say that Darwinism has led to the killing of untold millions of human beings.

Not only not an exaggeration, it's a outright lie.

Caesar's Gallic War killed an estimated million enemy and probably half that of noncombatants.
The Christians and the Muslims managed to kill an estimated 4½ million between them in the wars of the Crusades.
Credit Islam with 1½ million in their Iberian and Persian conquests. The Christan Church gets ½ million for Bohemia, another million for the Cathars in France, and seven million for the Thirty year war -- a third of Europe.
All that 150 years before Darwin was even born.
Of course, there's no need to mention the six million that died in the trans Atlantic slave traffic, or the 19 million slaves killed going to Muslim and the Oriental markets ...

In the 20th century, we get Hitler -- a Catholic turned demented; Joseph Stalin -- a Orthodox seminary student turned Orthodox Megalomaniac. Neither was particularly interested in Darwin or his theories. And the greatest murderer of all, Mao ze Tung, never heard of him.

With 10 kids with the same wife, I'd say Darwin has zip-zero-zilch-nada to do with "family breakdown", to say nothing about homosexuality.

Fascinating...
But what does that have to do with evolution or IDIOTS?

Laughing at Evolution

Dr. Edward Blick has been Professor of Aerodynamics, Nuclear Engineering, Geological Engineering, and other subjects for more than thirty years at the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Blick worked on Project Mercury at NASA, as well as the F4 fighter. He has written over ISO scientific papers, and he rej ects the possibility of an old Earth or the process of evolution occurring within either plant or animal life.
We all love to laugh, it's good medicine. We laughed at the Queen in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, who said, "I sometimes believe in six impossible things before breakfast." The Darwinists are even more hilarious—they not only believe, but also teach more than six impossible fairy tales in their biology classes. The history of their pathetic attempt to pump life into the Lenin-like corpse of evolution is full of laughs.
Charles Darwin was born into wealth. He spent two years in medical school, dropping out after spending too much time in bars. He had some divinity training but failed to make it as an Anglican minister. He was never a scientist but took a position as a naturalist on a ship and later wrote his racist books The Origin of Species and the Preservation of Favored Races and Descent of Man. He was ignorant of genetics. He married his first cousin. All seven of his children either died young or had mental or physical disorders.
Without any facts, he conjured up his pangenesis theory. He assumed that species changed to other species because all cells produced gemmules. Gemmules supposedly arose by some kind of reaction to the environment. Each of these gemmules entered the sex cells of the sperm or egg (it must have been crowded in there), which later were transmitted to the offspring. Big problem! No one could find Darwin's imaginary gemmules and pangenesis died shortly after birth!
In 1870, Adam Sedgewick, leading geologist of England, wrote Darwin: "I read your book with more pain than pleasure. Parts, I laughed at till my sides were sore; others I read with absolute sorrow, because I think them utterly false—you deserted the true method of induction." Induction is reasoning from facts to theory. Darwin reasoned from theory to facts! His writings were conjecture piled upon conjecture. "Maybe" and "perhaps" form the basis of his books!
Darwin's writings were not science but philosophical musings. But something had to be done to keep the world believing Darwinism. Prof.
Ernest Haeckel tried by faking drawings of embryos (which he claimed repeated "fish to reptile to mammal" evolution), but fellow embryolo-gists in his trial at Jena University discovered his fakes. Believe it or not, Haeckel's fakes are used as proofs of evolution in biology books today. His forgeries are like gonorrhea, a gift that keeps on giving!
The next attempt to resurrect Darwinism came in 1872. The British ship HMS Challenger had dredged ocean sediments for four years looking for half-formed fossils. None were found. Since none had ever been found on land, the evolutionary fairy tale of the gradual production of billions of fossils in sedimentary strata was quietly set aside. The Challenger did provide a momentary hope when it dredged up some blob from the ocean floor. It was a live microbe, some kind of a missing link! They named it Bathybuis Haeckeli after the old king ofbiblogical fakery, Ernest Haeckel. In 1875, however, it was discovered to be not a life form, but a chemical precipitate of sulfate of lime. True to form, the discovery was carefully swept under the rug and hidden from the public.
In the meantime Darwin had returned to Lamark's previously discarded idea, that giraffes developed long necks by stretching to reach those leaves on the top of trees. This theory died again in 1883 when German biologist Leopold Weisman cut offthe tails of white mice in 19 successive generations and the tails always reappeared. Similarly, after 4,000 years of circumcision, Jewish men still had foreskins. More bad news for poor old Saint Darwin!
Who can rescue Darwinism? In 1930 Austin H. Clark tried to plug the gap with a new theory, "zoogenesis." Clark was a well-respected Darwinist at the Smithsonian Institute. He had written books and 600 articles in five languages. However, to his dismay, he could never find any evidence of macroevolution in animals or plants. In his 1930 book The New Evolution: Zoogenesis he cited fact after fact proving macroevolution could not have occurred. He concluded, therefore, that plants and animals must have sprung fully formed from dirt and water! The evolutionary world was stunned into silence. Clark was the Carl Sagan of his day. He supposedly knew all the answers. Quickly they buried Clark's theory.
The next "batter up" was world-famous geneticist Richard Gold-schmidt, who tried to come to the rescue of the embarrassed Darwinians
by attempting to prove macroevolution was caused by mutations. For 25 years he was the godfather to millions of generations of gypsy moths. He zapped them with x-rays and chemicals. He found mutations produced nothing but deformities. No new species! He concluded rats were still rats and rabbits were still rabbits. In his 1940 book The Material Basis for Evolution, Goldschmidt exploded the ammunition box of evolutionary theory. He literally tore the theory to pieces. He was an honest atheist who faced the facts. But not wanting to acknowledge God, he proposed a new mechanism of evolution called the "Hopeful Monster Mechanism." One day an alligator laid an egg and a turkey hatched out! You've got to remember, boys and girls, this is science!
For the next 30 years evolutionists were in turmoil because they had (1) no proof that evolution had ever occurred, (2) no reasonable mechanism to explain evolution, and (3) zillions of missing links! They had bitter arguments among themselves about possible theories. The embarrassment of Goldschmidt's crude theory caused Harvard's Stephen Gould in 1972 and a little later, Steven Stanley of Johns Hopkins University to "smarten up" Goldschmidt's ugly theory by giving it a new name, "Punctuated Equilibrium" (Gould), and the even better "Quantum Speciation" (Stanley). But it was still a monster by any name.
The discovery in the 1950s of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson crushed the hopes of biological evolutionists. It provided clear evidence that every species is locked into its own coding pattern. Only variation within a kind (microevolution) can occur. Mathematicians showed the odds against forming DNA by chance were "quad-zillions and quad-zillions to one." Evolution by chance was impossible! But atheist Crick was not ready to believe in God. He dreamed up a new theory: some unknown "space alien" sprinkled sperm in our solar system and eventually creatures evolved on some planet (Krypton?). These "evolved space creatures" then built a "Noah's Ark" rocket ship and, after a long journey, came down to the earth to unload their zoo. Crick named his new theory "Panspermia." This, boys and girls, is called science or! Now NASA's "Life in Space Program" is spending billions of our tax dollars shooting probes into our solar system looking for this "sperm donor"!
There you have it—the skeletons in evolution's closet. The kooky theories of pangenesis, gemmules, Lamarkism, zoogenesis, punctuated equilibrium, quantum speciation, and panspermia are all just guesses. None were proven. They make good fodder for fairly tale writers. They are a barrel of laughs!
How can supposedly reasonable men believe this weird stuffand then try to pass it off as science? They've emptied out the stables and dumped it on the gullible public. Most Americans believe people with Ph.D.s in science are unbiased, honest, and seek the truth. But they are fallen creatures like the rest of humanity. They can have biases, be dishonest, and seek only to further their own goals, honorable or dishonorable.
The Darwinists have a well-oiled propaganda machine to keep their true goals hidden from the taxpayers, two-thirds of whom believe in creation. Darwinists have Web sites set up to deflect criticism of evolution and to further their legislative and judicial goals, which are to kill God and elevate humanism to His throne.
Darwinists try to hide their atheist religion from the majority of Americans who believe in God. One of the Darwinist Web sites has enlisted Jimmy Carter to proselyte Christians and baptize them into "The Church of Darwin" (in the name of the unholy trinity, Darwin, Haeckel,

and Nietzsche?). These new converts are called theistic evolutionists. At the 1959 Darwinian Centennial Celebration, Julian Huxley's keynote address focused on the total repudiation of God. Huxley was asked whj the world, 100 years ago, leaped at Darwin's book. He answered it freed us from God's sexual mores! Evolution is a religion of no God!
Darwinists have given up public debates because they lost hundreds of them in the 1970s and '80s. Why did they lose? As a participant in two of them, I will tell you. They lost because they had no proof. Amazing! No proof! They usually tried old debate tricks of personal attacks on their opponents, i.e. "You can't be a scientist because you believe the Bible," etc. But they lost because audiences were shocked—shocked that the Darwinists had no proof! And they have none today!
In editorials and letters to the editor, the Darwinists produce no proofs. They commonly try to bluff us with pompous statements like. "Evolution has been proved as much as gravity and it is believed by all scientists." Get real—sure, and the moon is made of green cheese! It's all bluff, designed to shut up critics and convert us to their atheistic religion. Hitler and his propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels would have been proud. You tell a lie long enough and loud enough and people will believe it! Unfortunately, a lot of Americans have swallowed the lie, including about half of our college graduates. Our courts and media are full of Darwinists. Their bulldog, the ACLU, is working overtime to wipe God from all of public life. Humanism over all is their goal!
Tragically the Darwinists are wrecking western civilization. In the first half of the twentieth century, Darwinism hijacked the militant policies of Germany. The religion of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Haeckel became the religion of Hitler and his Nazi gang. The result was 11 million dead in their attempt to produce the Aryan super race and a victorious Germany. World War II was the most violent form of evolutionism ever seen.
In the last half century, evolution has softly hijacked the American educational system and inflicted a great defeat on American culture. Crime has skyrocketed; homosexuality and gay marriage have been mainstreamed; and our morals have submerged into a cesspool. Why? Kids brainwashed with this kooky nonsense, are taught that they evolved from apes, so they act like apes. If it feels good, do it.
Not only are the Darwinians scrambling to deflect attacks from creationists, but also they are arguing with each other over their different theories. "So heated is the debate that one Darwinian says there are times when he thinks about going into a field with more intellectual honesty, the used car business" (Newsweek, April 8, 1985, p. 80).
"I suppose that nobody will deny that it is a great misfortune if an entire branch of science becomes addicted to a false theory. But this is what has happened in biology.... I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked as the greatest deceit in the history of science" (Soren Lovtrup, The Refutation of a Myth, 1987).
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