Scientists Find Evidence of God

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 19, 1999 | by Stephen Goode

Behe is optimistic about the future of the Intelligent Design Movement: "I don't know whether it's going to be two years or 20, but that's where the data of science is heading," he says. "Scientists sense that something's not quite right. There are new ideas we need new definitions for."

Dembski, whose recent book, The Design Inference, presents in great detail how the Intelligent Design argument satisfies logic and probability, likes to compare the movement's influence on science to the freedom and democracy movements and their effect on Eastern Europe. Criticism of Darwinism now threatens the hegemony of Darwinism, he says, just as the move toward freedom upset the Soviet empire.

Dembski emphasizes that the Intelligent Design Movement must prove its scientific mettle, but he nonetheless waxes expansive about where Intelligent Design thinking may lead: "Questions of morality can seemingly be added." Also possible: "revival of the whole notion of natural law."

Thaxton, who will chair a seminar on "Detecting Design in Nature" at the annual gathering of the American Scientific Affiliation in July, compares the situation Intelligent Design now is in with where quantum physics was a century ago. Max Planck, the quantum theorist, despaired somewhat about getting his theory accepted by his fellow physicists, Thaxton points out. He concluded that for his theory to gain respectability, a whole generation of scientists would have to die off and be replaced by younger men and women with more-flexible minds, ready to move in the direction data took them, which would be toward the quantum hypothesis. What has to be done to make Intelligent Design accepted, he concludes, "is to overcome the inertia of the age."

RELATED ARTICLE: Where to Read More About the Intelligent Design Movement

At the layman's level the quarterly magazine Cosmic Pursuit offers very readable essays by, and interviews with, &the Intelligent Design Movement's leading scientists and mathematicians. Subtitled "In Pursuit of Answers to Life's Big Questions," Cosmic Pursuit is published by Day Star Network in Wheeling, Ill., and is very new. Its second issue (Spring 1998) took up the subject of "Intelligent Design: Why Is Science Returning to the Old Way of Explaining Life."

The Intelligent Design Movement's professional journal is Origins & Design and can be found at www.arn.org/arn.> William A. Dembski traces the origins of the Intelligent Design Movement to the 1984 publication of The Mystery of Life's Origin (Philosophical Library) by Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley and Roger Olsen and Michael Denton's 1986 book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Adler & Adler), both of which pointed out flaws in Darwinism and evolutionary theory from a purely scientific point of view without reference to theological views on creation (see "A Giant Totters: Can Darwin Survive?" Dec. 21, 1992). More recently, Denton published Natures Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe (Free Press, 1998).

Also essential are three books by Phillip Johnson. One is Darwin on Trial (InterVarsity, 1991), in which the author, who teaches law at the University of California, Berkeley, subjects Darwinism to the same tests of validity that would be required in a court of law. From the same publisher come Johnson's Reason in the Balance (1995) and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds (1997).