It Should Be OK to Doubt Evolution
By: Brent Castillo
Wichita Eagle
April 10, 2008
Original Article
"Nothing can be questioned about Darwin or you are in severe academic jeopardy," actor Ben Stein said recently at an event to promote his new documentary, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed." The film will be released next week in theaters nationwide, including Wichita.
The premise of the film is that professors and scientists who support intelligent design, or who have strong reservations about Darwinian evolution, are shunned and regularly punished for publicizing their beliefs and doubts. They are afraid to talk openly about the shortcomings of evolution, and for the movie, some would only be interviewed if they were filmed in silhouette with their voices altered.
What Stein reports is reminiscent of the religious suppression scientists faced centuries ago.
"Anyone who questioned the orthodoxy of Darwinism was losing his job, getting harassed, losing his grants, losing his office, her office," Stein said. "This was not supposed to happen in a country based upon freedom of speech."
His movie may find a receptive audience. A poll by Zogby in 2006 showed 69 percent of Americans support the presentation of intelligent design in classrooms, while 21 percent believe that only Darwin's theory of evolution should be part of a high school's curriculum. Last year, a Gallup Poll found only 14 percent of Americans believe man developed on his own.
Those who doubt the mud-to-monkey-to-man type of evolution are a great source of frustration to some.
"No serious thinker could possibly be positively impressed by the arguments of the so-called intelligent design creationists," evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins said.
Most objectors to intelligent design say it's nothing more than dressed-up creationism. Intelligent design supporters say science, not theology, guides their beliefs.
The basic argument for intelligent design is that the world is too complex to have evolved naturally and that the mechanisms of evolution are flawed. That complexity has led some very smart people to the same conclusion.
In an interview last year, prominent atheist philosopher Antony Flew said it's what convinced him that there was some source of intelligence behind life.
"With every passing year, the more that was discovered about the richness and inherent intelligence of life, the less it seemed likely that a chemical soup could magically generate the genetic code," Flew said. He took a poke at Dawkins' "comical" effort in his book "The God Delusion" to explain the origin of life as being by "lucky chance."
"If that's the best argument you have," Flew said, "then the game is over."
Flew joins a long list of great thinkers and scientists who believe research proves there is more behind life and nature than only chance.
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds," Albert Einstein said.
There are too many gaps in evolution theory for many people to be completely satisfied by it. That leaves intelligent design as a plausible explanation, and it's something they should be able to talk about without fear of reprisal.
