Subject:  What Would Darwin Say?: The Ohio Intelligent Design Controversy |
Author:
GerryB.
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Date Posted: 07:53:14 03/14/02 Thu
Another very intersting column by Charles Colson.
BreakPoint with Charles Colson
Commentary #020314 - 03/14/2002
What Would Darwin Say?: The Ohio Intelligent Design Controversy
What would Darwin have said about the growing
intelligent design controversy in Ohio? We can't ask
him, of course. He's been dead for 120 years. But
there are tantalizing hints in Darwin's writings that
he might just have surprised, even shocked, his
present-day followers. Darwin was a lot friendlier to
intellectual freedom than many neo-Darwinists have
been.
Fellows of the Discovery Institute made national
headlines this week when they argued in open hearings
before the Ohio state board of education for teaching
intelligent design alongside evolution. Intelligent
design is the scientific theory that natural objects,
like organisms, display the hallmarks of a
purposeful, deliberate cause -- an intelligent agent
-- capable of effects that no natural law or chance
process could produce.
The response in much of the press against the
intelligent design proponents and the board members
who favor it has been vicious. Editorial columns of
most Ohio newspapers cried, "Nonsense!" "A dangerous
and unwise move," warned worried scientists in Ohio
and elsewhere. "There's no place in the science
classroom even to discuss proposals such as
intelligent design, which depart from the strict
naturalism of modern science" -- or so the alarmed
editorials have claimed.
What's fascinating is that not all media observers
react so hysterically. Commenting in TIME magazine,
for instance, science writer Robert Wright noted that
intelligent design advocates "have raised productive
doubts -- and, in science, being productively wrong
is nearly as valuable as being right." Going further,
Wright notes that "no one knows how DNA began to
replicate or how the universe got built in such a way
that replication was possible. It's not crazy to
think that such initial conditions were set by some
intelligence for an overarching purpose that is still
unfolding."
Could an Ohio high school biology student bring this
TIME magazine article into her science classroom for
discussion? More to the point, could she bring in
Darwin's classic, the ORIGIN OF SPECIES itself?
And here's where one can't help but wonder what
Darwin would have said about the Ohio controversy.
Not many people have read more than a few pages of
the ORIGIN OF SPECIES, if they've opened the book at
all. But on the last page, Darwin says that life
itself was "first breathed by the Creator" -- a
phrase that would today give fits to civil liberties
lawyers.
And there are other passages in the ORIGIN that
should worry the Ohio opponents of intelligent
design. In fact, the passage I'm about to read should
be posted on the wall of every science classroom in
the nation, as a motto upholding the principles of
intellectual freedom in science. "For I am well
aware," Darwin wrote, "that scarcely a single point
is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be
adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions
directly opposite to those at which I have arrived. A
fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and
balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of
each question."
Now that's intellectual fairness: fully stating and
balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of
the question. That's what many citizens in Ohio are
struggling for -- and what, if he were around today,
Darwin himself would tell the school board to do --
sounds good to me.
For further reading and information:
Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey, DEVELOPING A
CHRISTIAN WORLDVIEW OF SCIENCE AND EVOLUTION (Tyndale
House, 1999).
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