Stephen C. Meyer

Stephen Meyer remembers the parade of prominent provocative thinkers who traipsed through McFarlin Auditorium in the mid-1980s when he was studying graduate-level mathematics at Southern Methodist University. So he’s bemused by the stance of the university’s science professors, who recently tried to shut down a conference he organized for April 13-14 at McFarlin with co-sponsorship by the SMU law school’s Christian Legal Society. Dubbed “Darwin Versus Design,” the confab will focus on intelligent design, or the theory that life has its genesis in intelligence rather than Darwinian randomness and natural selection.

“The largest objection began with the title itself,” says Larry Ruben, chair of SMU’s biology department. “This was going to be some kind of a scientific debate, Darwin versus intelligent design.”

Ruben protests the conference is misleading and dishonest—not really a debate about competing origin-of-life theories at all, since there are no Darwinists on the conference panel. It is simply an intelligent design binge. “What really irked the most was it appeared to be a program on science on something that scientists don’t accept as being science.”

Michael Keas, professor of the history and philosophy of science at Biola University in Southern California and a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, an I.D.-promoting group that is organizing the conference, makes no apologies for the exclusion of Darwinists. “The other side has traditionally had a monopoly in higher education,” he says. “So this is a good opportunity for design theorists to make their case.”

But Meyer, who as director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture is a featured speaker at the conference, says objections such as Ruben’s stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of intelligent design theory emanating from distorted media portrayals and U.S. District Judge John E. Jones’ December 2005 ruling in a Dover, Pennsylvania, lawsuit challenging a school board’s requirement that biology teachers mention I.D. Jones ruled intelligent design is not science because it doesn’t put forward any testable hypotheses.

SEATTLE – After several years of claiming that there is no debate about the theory of intelligent design (ID) researchers have published an article bringing the debate to the pages of the latest issue of Science. Three researchers, Jamie Bridgham, Sean Carroll and Joe Thornton claim to have shown how an irreducibly complex system, such as that described by Discovery senior fellow Read More ›

Dr. Meyer explains intelligent design to host Tavis Smiley and discusses how evolution should be taught in schools. Audio