The systematic study of nature with a view to making discoveries about God was known in the eighteenth century as natural theology. In the last half of the twentieth century, this enterprise, coupled with a literalist interpretation of the Bible as a true and accurate account of natural history and its beginnings, came to be known as creation science
Representative Tom DeLay, House leader and one of the most powerful people in Congress, has asserted, ‘‘Only Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities we find in this world—only Christianity.’’ As Krugman goes on to note: ‘‘After the Columbine school shootings, Mr. DeLay suggested that the tragedy had occurred, INTRODUCTION 5 ‘because our school systems teach our children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized [sic] out of some primordial mud.’ Guns don’t kill people, Charles Darwin kills people’’ (New York Times, December 17, 2002). Thus we see that the current assaults on science education in the United States are really the tip of a much larger religious fundamentalist iceberg, an iceberg capable of sinking rather more than school curricula
*The result has been termed stealth creationism—the less God is mentioned explicitly, the more likely it is that intelligent design theory will eventually fly under secular legal radar and bomb an increasingly fragile system of public education.
Kent Hovind, for example, who runs Creation Science Ministries in Florida and promulgates theories favored by the antigovernment groups, maintains, ‘‘Democracy is evil and contrary to God’s law’’ (Intelligence Report, Southern Poverty Law Center, Summer 2001, Issue 102
**- *while *virtually all creation scientists are united in their opposition to secular evolutionary biology (and many are equally repelled by theistic versions of evolution, such as those versions of evolutionary thought that see in evolutionary phenomena the unfolding of God’s plan), they disagree among themselves on a wide array of other matters. *
In fact, by seeing the biblical chronology and the events and peoples depicted in the Bible as true and accurate depictions of history, these creationists must also reject many well-established archaeological facts about human history (Davies 1992, 1998; Finkelstein and Silberman 2001; Thompson 1999).
While young Earth creationists take the biblical chronology very literally, they are forced to go to fanciful lengths to accommodate modern scientific discoveries. For example, the story of Noah’s Ark looms large in many of these religious fantasies, where it is often presented as a genuine zoological rescue mission. In some versions, even the dinosaurs entered the ark two by two. We are told that humans and dinosaurs lived together and that the Grand Canyon was scooped out by a tidal wave during the Great Flood. Mount Ararat, the resting place for Noah’s Ark (the Holy Grail sought by numerous creationist expeditions to modern Turkey)
Henry Morris of ICR has said of evolution that ‘‘the entire monstrous complex was revealed to Nimrod at Babel and perhaps by Satan himself.... Satan is the originator of the concept of evolution’’ (1974, 74–75).
the Turkish experience can be seen as a warning of the dangers that accompany efforts by religious extremists who are bent on the destruction of a secular government.
Turkish scholars U ¨mit Sayin and Aykut Kence have noted of the BAV (the Turkish counterpart of the ICR) that: BAV has a long history of contact with American creationists, including receiving assistance from ICR. Duane Gish and Henry Morris visited Turkey in 1992, just after the establishment of BAV, and participated in a creationist conference in Istanbul. Morris, the former head of ICR, became well acquainted with Turkish fundamentalists and Islamic sects during his numerous trips to Turkey in search of Noah’s Ark. BAV’s creationist conferences in April and June 1998 in Istanbul and Ankara, which included many US creationists, developed after Harun Yahya started to publish his anti-evolution books, which were delivered to the public free of charge or given away by daily fundamentalist newspapers. (1999, 25). According to Arthur Shapiro (1999), the links between the ICR and Islamic extremists in Turkey were forged as part of a strategy by extremists in Turkey to undermine the nation’s secular government. Shapiro has shown that ICR materials have been adapted to Islamic ends as part of a concerted attack on secular science in particular and secular belief in general.
For this reason, if some people commit terrorism using the concepts and symbols of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the name of those religions, you can be sure that those people are not Muslims, Christians or Jews. They are real Social Darwinists. They hide under the cloak of religion, but they are not genuine believers....That is because they are ruthlessly committing a crime that religion forbids, and in such a way as to blacken religion in peoples’ eyes. For this reason the root of terrorism that plagues our planet is not any of the divine religions, but is in atheism, and the expression of atheism in our times: ‘‘Darwinism’’ and ‘‘materialism.’’ (2001, 19–20) Muzaffar Iqbal, president of the Center for Islam and Science, has recently endorsed work by intelligent design theorist William Dembski.
I will argue that there are two fundamental kinds of design argument. One concerns complex, adapted structures and processes in biology; the other concerns the universe as a whole. Both arguments involve topics about which there are gaps in our current scientific knowledge. I will show how the argument from design, far from being undercut by the rise of modern science, was in fact bolstered by it. I will also discuss some early critical reactions to the argument due, among others, to David Hume and Immanuel Kant.
Intelligent design theorists make much of naturalism and its deficiencies. But it is unclear whether the natural sciences, as opposed to particular natural scientists with extrascientific agendas, are actually committed to naturalist philosophy. Scientists do tend to focus on the search for natural causes for effects of interest, but perhaps this involves less of a prior commitment to a naturalistic philosophy (most scientists in my experience— exceptions duly noted—couldn’t give a hoot for philosophy anyway) and is more a reflection of the collective experience of scientists of all stripes over the last 300 years of modern science. We simply have not seen convincing evidence for conclusions supporting the operation of supernatural causes in nature. On this view, while scientists do not categorically reject the possibility of supernatural causation, they do not take it seriously at present either, primarily because of a complete lack of convincing evidence. On this view, the naturalism of the natural sciences may be methodological, reflecting long experience sifting evidence to support causal explanations, rather than philosophical or metaphysical,
In chapter 5, I will present some recent and influential biochemical arguments that have been put forward, by Michael Behe and others, to justify the conclusion of intelligent design. Since biochemistry was essentially an unborn fetus in the body of science in Darwin’s day, it is certainly possible that these new arguments are not simply old wine in new bottles but represent a substantial challenge to evolutionary biology. The issue here will hinge on the concept of irreducible complexity, a special type of biological complexity that has been alleged to resist an explanation in evolutionary terms. The biochemical design arguments, as well as their broader implications, will be subject to critical scrutiny. In the course of this analysis, it will be shown how irreducible complexity could have evolved, and some relevant evidence will be discussed.