A Marvelous Prospect

The 1964 movie Inherit the Wind is a crude dramatization of the Scopes Monkey trial, a court test in 1926 of the Tennessee law against teaching evolution (actually teaching anything but Biblical creationism) in Tennessee public schools. In the middle of the interesting drama is a continual caricature of Christians in the community. The portrayal is not humorous, but rather disparaging – casting the church-going townsfolk as not only ignorant, but stupid, and noisily and loudly so. The premise is that these folks only believe what they’ve been taught, and don’t bother them with the facts.

Well well, how things do move and shake. It seems that the shoe is now on the other foot. Perhaps you’ve heard of the arguments against evolution based on “intelligent design.” Ever since Darwin, biologists have wrestled with trying to explain away the appearance of design in all of life, with first this author and then the next attributing this appearance to this or that causal factor – anything but a Designer. Now they have a new problem – more and more evidence piling up in favor of a causal design. So the true believers continue to grow louder and more noisy in their attacks against those who would present this evidence. One might even say doing so ignorantly – without bothering to check the facts themselves, look at the new and growing assortment of evidence of design. We won’t call them stupid.

Actually, Darwin’s theories deal only with the origin of species – that is changes from one type of life to another, and they do not address the origin of life. No naturalistic explanation for the origin of life has been widely adopted amongst the scientific community. Some proposals are actually bizarre. Richard Dawkins, a celebrated spokesman for evolutionary biology, suggested in an interview in the movie Expelled that life may well have been seeded on this planet from outer space – a viewpoint the late Carl Sagan would be proud to hear. But of course that just begs the question – how did life start on that far away planet, eh?

Here are some resources if you’re interested in this debate:

The Signature in the Cell, by Dr. Stephen C. Myer, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. Additional scholarly articles are listed at his site, stephencmeyer.org

Intelligent Design article at Wikipedia – here the very definition of science is in play. Interesting debate, to say the least.

intelligentdesign.org

Creationism’s Trojan Horse – the Wedge of Intelligent Design :: Why Darwin Matters – The Case Against Intelligent Design

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

1. Marvin Skid says:

   July 29, 2011 at 12:50 PM

   You get a gold star for putting the church of the fly spaghetti monster on there! The thing most people don’t realize is the intelligent design and evolution aren’t on different sides of the fence. Evolution could be the method at which God created life, who are we to say otherwise (Genesis is awful vague, and seven days of creation is very likely a symbolic number for completeness). The problem lies in scientist putting the cart before the horse and try to come up with an origin on their own, with little evidence to support it.