Audience listens lecturer at workshop
Audience listens lecturer at workshop in conference hall
Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

Are the Darwinists Afraid to Debate Us?

We want a discussion of ideas Published in Dallas News

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 cscinfo@discovery.org.

John G. West

Senior Fellow, Managing Director, and Vice President of Discovery Institute
Dr. John G. West is Vice President of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and Managing Director of the Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Formerly the Chair of the Department of Political Science and Geography at Seattle Pacific University, West is an award-winning author and documentary filmmaker who has written or edited 12 books, including Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science, The Magician’s Twin: C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society, and Walt Disney and Live Action: The Disney Studio’s Live-Action Features of the 1950s and 60s. His documentary films include Fire-Maker, Revolutionary, The War on Humans, and (most recently) Human Zoos. West holds a PhD in Government from Claremont Graduate University, and he has been interviewed by media outlets such as CNN, Fox News, Reuters, Time magazine, The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post.

Bruce Chapman

Cofounder and Chairman of the Board of Discovery Institute
Bruce Chapman has had a long career in American politics and public policy at the city, state, national, and international levels. Elected to the Seattle City Council and as Washington State's Secretary of State, he also served in several leadership posts in the Reagan administration, including ambassador. In 1991, he founded the public policy think tank Discovery Institute, where he currently serves as Chairman of the Board and director of the Chapman Center on Citizen Leadership.