America to Science Educators

It's amazing how much brain-washing the American people can endure and still come out of it with their brains in good working order. We had fresh evidence of this in recent days in the New York Times. In an excellent article, religion writer Laurie Goodstein described the results of a new poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life: Nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism taught alongside evolution in public schools. Surprisingly, it's not just Christians who want this: So do majorities of non-Christians. This is amazing. For more than a century, scientific and cultural elites have told us that if we believed in anything except Darwinian evolution-if, heaven forbid, we believed that God designed the world and everything in it-well, we must be descendents of those Neanderthals who showed up at the Scopes trial. The poll used the word creationism. I suspect that if the poll had used the term intelligent design, the results would have been even more striking. Creationism is, after all, a religious term that attempts to prove that the first chapters of the biblical book of Genesis are literally true. But intelligent design is scientific in nature and would have much broader appeal. It maintains that the appearance of design in living things is best explained by positing an intelligent cause-not by a belief in an undirected process like natural selection. Intelligent design has gained tremendous traction in recent years. Hundreds of scientists now openly support it. Everyone from Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) to Cardinal Schönborn to President Bush has come out in favor of teaching both theories. Naturally, this infuriates the Darwin lobby. Eugenie Scott, who directs the National Center for Science Education, dismisses the science behind intelligent design as "dismal." But the empirical evidence is not so easily dismissed. In fact, you might wonder, given the mounting evidence for intelligent design, why so many scientists and teachers fiercely oppose letting students hear about it. The answer is that Darwinism entails a complete philosophical worldview called naturalism, which allows for nothing but nature and natural causes; it denies any transcendent purpose to life. In fact, the two central elements of Darwin's theory-gradual changes and the blind sifting of natural selection-were proposed expressly to get rid of design and purpose in biology, that is, to get rid of God. As Richard Dawkins, the Oxford professor, confided, Darwin made it intellectually respectable to be an atheist. Well, you and I ought to take advantage of this new poll data. We can approach local school boards and say, "Look, questions are being raised by respectable scientists about the validity of Darwinian evolution, and our kids need to hear about them." Information on our website (www.breakpoint.org), including the poll data, will help you do this. It's ironic to find the secular New York Times running stories proving that no matter how much propaganda gets thrown at us by Darwinian evolutionists, Americans know better. The imago Dei (that's "Image of God" for the Darwinists) in us whispers the truth: God designed the heavens and the earth.

09/20/05