Are the Darwinists afraid to debate us?
Tim Campbell
We want a discussion of ideas
Dallas Morning News
07:37 AM CDT on Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Nowhere is the free exchange of ideas supposed to be more robust or
uninhibited than on college campuses.
Thus, it is disheartening that certain professors and even some
journalists are seeking to prevent scientists and philosophers who
support the theory of intelligent design from explaining their views
at the Darwin v. Design conference on the Southern Methodist
University campus Friday and Saturday.
At the conference, scholars will present empirical data from biology,
biochemistry, physics, mathematics and related fields that provide
strong evidence that features of living things and the universe are
the products of an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process
such as the neo-Darwinian mechanism of natural selection acting on
random (chance) mutations.
Unfortunately, would-be censors are trying to get the conference
banned from campus by ludicrously comparing intelligent design
proponents to faith healers or even Holocaust deniers.
Faith healers and Holocaust deniers are not on the faculties of
reputable universities. Scientists who support intelligent design
are.
These scientists include biochemist and author Michael Behe at Lehigh
University (who will be speaking at the SMU conference),
microbiologist Scott Minnich at the University of Idaho and astronomer
Guillermo Gonzalez at Iowa State University, whose research has been
featured in Scientific American and who co-authored a book describing
the evidence for design of the cosmos that has been praised even by
some leading evolutionists.
Scholars who support intelligent design are making their arguments in
books put out by academic publishers such as Cambridge University
Press and Michigan State University Press and in technical articles
published in peer-reviewed science and philosophy of science
journals.
If the evidence for design can be presented in such forums, what is so
frightening about allowing it to be heard at SMU?
Proponents of Darwin's theory typically insist that the evidence for
evolution is so overwhelming that no rational person can challenge it,
but they equivocate on the meaning of "evolution." Intelligent design
does not challenge the idea that evolution occurs, rather the claim
that the development of the intricate and highly functional features
in nature is the result of a blind and undirected process that cannot
select for future function.
Contrary to the bravado of Darwinists, there is considerable empirical
evidence of the insufficiency of the Darwinian mechanism. Research
published by protein scientist Douglas Axe in the Journal of Molecular
Biology shows just how astonishingly rare certain working protein
sequences are, casting severe doubts that a Darwinian process of
chance mutations could generate them. In the words of Dr. Axe, the
rarity of these working protein sequences among all the possible
combinations is "less than one in a trillion trillion trillion
trillion trillion trillion."
Various science professors at SMU have called on their university to
ban our conference, and more recently some of them have declared that
they "have a duty as practitioners of science to speak out" against
intelligent design.
But if they truly believe that they have a duty to "speak out," why
not speak out by engaging intelligent design scholars in a serious
discussion?
We invited the chairs of SMU's departments of biology, geological
sciences and anthropology to send representatives to the first night
of our conference so they can present their objections and even
interrogate intelligent design scholars with their toughest
questions.
As we were writing this, the anthropology department declined due to a
scheduling conflict, but the other departments have not responded.
Unfortunately, this behavior is all too common among defenders of
Darwinian theory. They publicly disparage intelligent design (often
showing through their comments that they know very little about what
it actually proposes), but they refuse to engage in genuine dialogue.
What a different approach from that modeled by Darwin himself, who
humbly and patiently responded to objections to his theory and who
frankly acknowledged that "a fair result can be obtained only by fully
stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each
question."
What are today's Darwinists so afraid of?
Bruce Chapman is the president of Discovery Institute, a public policy
think tank, and John West is the associate director of the institute's
Center for Science & Culture. They can be e-mailed at
csc...@discovery.org.
Charles Brough
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