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Two in one.
1) Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Holiday Lectures 2005 are on
Evolution. There are four lectures available on the web.
http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/lectures/. You can order a DVD as
well.
2) Intelligent Design meeting its Maker?
Perhaps at an intellectual level but we still have the problem of the
public's lack of understanding of evolution. None of the museum
programs are/were designed to counter the arguments of intelligent
design but to inform the public of the science involved. That it may
disappear from scholarly and or school board arguments is good but
what about the public's perception and their support for evolution as
a science that they and their children have to understand. Lets not
be lulled by this; evolution is still an important issue.
Martin
December 4, 2005
Ideas & Trends
Intelligent Design Might Be Meeting Its Maker
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
TO read the headlines, intelligent design as a challenge to evolution
seems to be building momentum.
In Kansas last month, the board of education voted that students
should be exposed to critiques of evolution like intelligent design.
At a trial of the Dover, Pa., school board that ended last month, two
of the movement's leading academics presented their ideas to a
courtroom filled with spectators and reporters from around the world.
President Bush endorsed teaching "both sides" of the debate - a
position that polls show is popular. And Pope Benedict XVI weighed in
recently, declaring the universe an "intelligent project."
Intelligent design posits that the complexity of biological life is
itself evidence of a higher being at work. As a political cause, the
idea has gained currency, and for good reason. The movement was
intended to be a "big tent" that would attract everyone from biblical
creationists who regard the Book of Genesis as literal truth to
academics who believe that secular universities are hostile to faith.
The slogan, "Teach the controversy," has simple appeal in a democracy.
Behind the headlines, however, intelligent design as a field of
inquiry is failing to gain the traction its supporters had hoped for.
It has gained little support among the academics who should have been
its natural allies. And if the intelligent design proponents lose the
case in Dover, there could be serious consequences for the movement's
credibility.
On college campuses, the movement's theorists are academic pariahs,
publicly denounced by their own colleagues. Design proponents have
published few papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to
reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few
grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they
asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research.
"They never came in," said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice
president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was
skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were
initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned.
"From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the
intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of
scientific review," he said.
While intelligent design has hit obstacles among scientists, it has
also failed to find a warm embrace at many evangelical Christian
colleges. Even at conservative schools, scholars and theologians who
were initially excited about intelligent design say they have come to
find its arguments unconvincing. They, too, have been greatly swayed
by the scientists at their own institutions and elsewhere who have
examined intelligent design and found it insufficiently substantiated
in comparison to evolution.
"It can function as one of those ambiguous signs in the world that
point to an intelligent creator and help support the faith of the
faithful, but it just doesn't have the compelling or explanatory
power to have much of an impact on the academy," said Frank D.
Macchia, a professor of Christian theology at Vanguard University, in
Costa Mesa, Calif., which is affiliated with the Assemblies of God,
the nation's largest Pentecostal denomination.
At Wheaton College, a prominent evangelical university in Illinois,
intelligent design surfaces in the curriculum only as part of an
interdisciplinary elective on the origins of life, in which students
study evolution and competing theories from theological, scientific
and historical perspectives, according to a college spokesperson.
The only university where intelligent design has gained a major
institutional foothold is a seminary. Southern Baptist Theological
Seminary in Louisville, Ky., created a Center for Science and
Theology for William A. Dembski, a leading proponent of intelligent
design, after he left Baylor, a Baptist university in Texas, amid
protests by faculty members opposed to teaching it.
Intelligent design and Mr. Dembski, a philosopher and mathematician,
should have been a good fit for Baylor, which says its mission is
"advancing the frontiers of knowledge while cultivating a Christian
world view." But Baylor, like many evangelical universities, has many
scholars who see no contradiction in believing in God and evolution.
Derek Davis, director of the J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State
Studies at Baylor, said: "I teach at the largest Baptist university
in the world. I'm a religious person. And my basic perspective is
intelligent design doesn't belong in science class."
Mr. Davis noted that the advocates of intelligent design claim they
are not talking about God or religion. "But they are, and everybody
knows they are," Mr. Davis said. "I just think we ought to quit
playing games. It's a religious worldview that's being advanced."
John G. West, a political scientist and senior fellow at the
Discovery Institute, the main organization supporting intelligent
design, said the skepticism and outright antagonism are evidence that
the scientific "fundamentalists" are threatened by its arguments.
"This is natural anytime you have a new controversial idea," Mr. West
said. "The first stage is people ignore you. Then, when they can't
ignore you, comes the hysteria. Then the idea that was so radical
becomes accepted. I'd say we're in the hysteria phase."
In the Dover trial, where intelligent design finally got its day in
court, the movement faces perhaps the greatest potential for a
serious setback.
The case is the first to test whether intelligent design can be
taught in a public school, or whether teaching it is unconstitutional
because it advances a particular religious belief. The Dover board
voted last year to read students a short statement at the start of
ninth-grade biology class saying that evolution is a flawed theory
and intelligent design is an alternative they should study further.
If the judge in the Dover case rules against intelligent design, the
decision would be likely to dissuade other school boards from
incorporating it into their curriculums. School boards might already
be wary because of a simple political fact: eight of the school-board
members in Dover who supported intelligent design were voted out of
office in elections last month and replaced by a slate of opponents.
Advocates of intelligent design perceived the risk as so great that
the Discovery Institute said it had tried to dissuade the school
board in Dover from going ahead and taking a stand in favor of
intelligent design. The institute opposed the Dover board's action,
it said, because it "politicized" what should be a scientific issue.
Now, with a decision due in four or five weeks, design proponents
like Mr. West of Discovery said the Dover trial was a "sideshow" -
one that will have little bearing on the controversy.
"The future of intelligent design, as far as I'm concerned, has very
little to do with the outcome of the Dover case," Mr. West said. "The
future of intelligent design is tied up with academic endeavors. It
rises or falls on the science."
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