Related articles and links |  1 of 2

Seventy years after Darwin's theory triumphed in the landmark Scopes trial, a brash new generation of faith-friendly scientists is having unexpected success in reshaping the contentious debate over the origin of life and the universe.

In a stunning development three months ago, social conservatives successfully persuaded the Kansas State Board of Education to issue new standards that would remove Darwinian evolutionary theory from state tests. Local school districts may still decide what to teach. To avoid similar controversy, the Kentucky Education Department quietly dropped the word evolution from its teaching guidelines in October.

But the backlash may already be under way. New Mexico education officials recently banned the teaching of creationism in public schools.

Amid public policy rumblings on creation versus evolution, a fresh crop of scientists—many associated with the Seattle-based Discovery Institute—are developing their theory that the universe shows clear evidence of "intelligent design."

Researchers gathered in New York in September to discuss their work and propose a new way to study the origins of life and the universe. Phillip Johnson, a law professor at University of California at Berkeley and a strategist for the intelligent-design movement, calls the institute's scientists "the wedge" who are driving into the cracks of modernist science. As they push forward, Johnson predicts, Darwinian theory will be split apart like a dry log. He reasons that because evolution cannot be fully proven from science itself, some scientists by default invoke dogmatically held beliefs, not scientific results.

TOO MUCH DESIGN? Origins scientists are going beyond their critique of Darwinian theory to expand their own field research. Both the Discovery Institute (DI)—a conservative public-policy center specializing in the science and technology of the information age—and the Institute for Christian Research have launched multiple-scientist, long-term research programs.

But only DI scientists have proposed a more far-reaching program of detecting design in the universe. Origins science is not the only research area to search for a "blueprint." Many fields depend on the ability to detect design, including intellectual property law, forensic science, insurance investigations, cryptography, archaeology, computer science, and the search for life in outer space.

The universe is so "irreducibly complex," says DI fellow William Dembski, it is hard to discover any explanation except intelligent design. Darwinian theory concerning the evolution of life specifies that complex structures be built by one small functional improvement after another. But if a system is irreducibly complex, the interacting parts must all be together before any functional improvement can be made. Small changes before the complex structure exists cannot improve any function, so they have no survival value.

Yet some attenders of the New York meeting expressed that a weakness of current intelligent-design ideas could be that they require too much design. DI supports a project against the idea of "junk DNA." Many parts in DNA strands appear to have no purpose. Many scientists believe the strands are leftovers or random fillers between the parts that carry real messages. In contrast, DI scientists believe that if intelligent design is true, then all parts of the DNA chain must have a function.

Some scientists in earlier generations, heirs to Isaac Newton's clocklike image of the cosmos, also imagined that everything must have a benign purpose. Consequently, Darwin's rediscovery of violence and struggle in nature caught them by surprise. Morally and logically offended, they asked how a God of beauty and order could work through violence and disorder. Generally, they did not reconsider how their mechanistic world-view left out the devastating effects of the Fall as detailed in the Genesis narrative. Some wonder if intelligent design theorists are making the same mistake.

next page... |  1 of 2

November 15 1999, Vol. 43, No. 13