Melchior:
Have you read the evidence presented? Or are you just making an assumption based on reading the oppositions incredibly weak critiques of strawmen? How can you say there is no evidence of design? Tt is everywhere and so obvious a 5 year old can see it. When you see and airplane, something far less detailed in design that a bird, would you say there is no evidence it had a designer? I swear people are leaving their brains and common sense in bed on this issue.
I haven’t read through to the end of this discussion, but upon reading this comment, I have to jump in.
There is a difference between intelligent design and “Intelligent Design.” I doubt that very many in these discussions would disagree with the former. Most of us are Christians here and believe that God is the Designer. We certainly agree that evidence of design is everywhere in creation. Nature has God’s fingerprints all over it. Perhaps you have done so innocently, but your post which I quote above is a strawman. You are attacking something that none of us here believe.
“Intelligent Design,” as a specific contemporary movement, is another matter entirely. It has a specific definition which cannot be excised out of the discussion. The term, as defined by the proponents of this particular movement, is limited to literal 6-day creationism with an earth age of about 6000 years. There is absolutely no astrophysical, geological, biological, or anthropological evidence to support this. That is why the judge correctly ruled that it is not appropriate to teach in a science class. It is not a scientific theory.
As others have suggested, I see no problem teaching the concept of a 6-day creation and young earth within other academic disciplines, however, such as philosophy or humanities.
The issue has become disingenuously highjacked by extremists on both sides. ID proponents dishonestly imply that theirs is the only position that can be supported with faithfulness to scripture and God. Atheistic evolutionists (those that assert that evolution occured through impersonal random events in a godless universe) are happy to monopolize the theory of evolution. The more Christians that abandon the overwhelming evidence of an old earth and evolutionary development of species, the happier the atheists are.
It really frustrates me that both of these groups have convoluted the issue so much. As Christians, we must reject that we are here by accident, through a series of random events and without the guiding hand of God. We must reject that we are here through an impersonal process. But there is no contradiction between scripture and the theory that the means by which God created the world was through an evolutionary process. And there is no capitulation here. God has given us a world which we are to seek to understand. Nature provides us with an epistemological basis for knowing God personally and being saved (Romans 1:20). Ironically, modern science did not emerge until society became Christianized. There are some important reasons for why science could not emerge from far eastern cultures, in spite of the fact that they were relatively sophisticated in some ways.
Christians’ suspicion of science is unfounded and ill-advised. Moreover, it allows atheists to hold a monopoly on several truths that do not belong to them. All truth belongs to God. Christians need to take back the evolution debate and own what is true and reject what is not true.
