11.30.06
Fanatics in the classroom
Fanatics in the classroom: Peter Hitches complains of the treatment of ID. He is right about the attempt by ID people to point to the limits of natural selection, but I think that the ID argument goes a bridge too far beyond that and ends up making a mistake similar to that made by Darwinists.
But what’s interesting is that many of the Genesis people, who control large funds, will not support the campaign for ID - because ID refuses to endorse the ‘Young Earth’ Bible literalist position. Now, when people turn down the possibility of generous cash aid, that seems to me to suggest that principle is involved.
ID, whose opponents haven’t bothered to find out much about it because they already know it’s balderdash, is not in fact an all-embracing theory about the origin of species. Darwinists seem to have thought they needed to have such a theory, since they had overthrown centuries of Christian orthodoxy. So, rather than just sticking to their basic and unquestionable point, that the Church could no longer claim that certainty was on its side, they developed a complete explanation of everything, which has been under constant revision ever since as new facts have come to light or - just as important - failed to come to light.
Perhaps this is why evolutionists assume that their opponents also have an all-embracing theory that explains in detail how the realm of nature came to be as it is. Well, they used to, but they mostly do not any more. The original opponents of Darwin tried to stick to the Biblical theory. But they were defeated not by Darwin but by the growing body of scientific proof that the Earth is far too old for the Bible account to be literally true. Many ID supporters concede all that. What they say is much more subtle.
They examine various organisms in the light of the latest science, and argue that it is highly improbable that such organisms could have evolved as Darwinists believe. This is the theory of ‘irreducible complexity;’ advanced by the microbiologist Michael Behe (pronounced ‘Beehee’).