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A rchive Date
[ 16-10-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
      [http://www.torontosun.com/Lifestyle/Columnists/MeedWard_Marianne/2005/10/16/1264191.html

      Evolution Of Ideas
      The argument regarding intelligent design versus evolution goes on
      By Marianne Meed Ward
      Sun, October 16, 2005

      Apparently the atheists were spitting in their coffee last week. That's when I suggested that intelligent design - the theory that a higher being created the universe - should be taught in science classes. Seems some of our homegrown no-faith-ers would take a Pennsylvanian approach if they could - sue the local school board as some parents in Dover did to stop their school teaching the theory.

      This week we look at the theory itself. Does it have any merit, and where should it be taught - science or religion class - if at all?

      Intelligent design is being taught in Ontario, albeit in Catholic schools only. Ontario public schools require a strictly secular scientific approach to origins. But since Catholic separate schools use public money (the only religious group that can - don't get me started on that inequity), those schools should be accountable to the public.

      In those schools you'll hear about scientists like Michael Polanyi and Michael Behe, and the idea of irreducible complexity. As biochemists were unraveling the secrets - and complexities - of DNA, Polanyi began to formulate the idea that we are too complex to have evolved. Evolution essentially argues that we "grow" what we need to survive, and lose what is unnecessary. That process may explain simple organisms or functions, but what about something more complex, like an eyeball? Unless it emerged fully formed, it never would have emerged at all. The component parts of an eyeball, being useless without the subsequent parts, would have passed into extinction before the rest of the eyeball was formed. But the theory of evolution doesn't allow for organisms to emerge fully formed. So the theory of intelligent design came to be.

      A number of credible scientists have elaborated on the idea of design in creation - without particularly trying to advance the idea of a designer - God. The authors of The Mystery Of Life's Origin explore the idea of design in nature without bringing in religious assumptions. Elsewhere, molecular biologist Michael Denton, in Evolution: A Theory In Crisis, puts the design-without-a-designer idea this way: The inference of design in the universe "may have religious implications, but it does not depend on religious presuppositions."

      In other words, the concept can be investigated and defended scientifically. Which is why it should be taught in science class. But that's unlikely to assuage the critics who believe intelligent design is just another way to say God created the earth in six 24-hour days. That's creationism, and can't be taught in schools following a 1987 U.S. Supreme Court. The Discovery Institute in Seattle (Discovery.org ), the worldwide think-tank on intelligent design, offers this distinction between creationism and intelligent design: "Creationism or creation science is focused on defending a particular reading of the Genesis account, usually including the creation of the earth by the biblical God a few thousand years ago. The theory of intelligent design isn't based on religious presuppositions but simply argues that an intelligent cause is the best explanation for certain features of the natural world. Unlike creationism ... intelligent design does not consider the identity of the designer nor does it defend the Genesis account (or that of any other sacred text for that matter)."

      That intelligent design theorists refuse to identify the designer - because that is a question outside of science - has allowed some atheists and former atheists, like physicist Fred Hoyle and British philosopher Antony Flew, to embrace the theory, even though they reject the Judeo-Christian God.

      Intelligent design is a subject for science. The identity of the designer? That we can leave to religion.

      Have a letter for the editor? E-mail it to editor@tor.sunpub.com
      Copyright © 2005, Canoe Inc. All rights reserved.


      World Fact Book (CIA)]


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