The Weekly Sam: Darwin Versus Intelligent Design By Samuel L. Blumenfeld

Back in 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a 1981 Louisiana law which
mandated a balanced treatment in teaching evolution and creation in the public schools.
The Court decided that the intent of the law “was clearly to advance the religious
viewpoint that a supernatural being created humankind,” and therefore violated the First
Amendment’s prohibition on a government establishment of religion. In other words, the
Court adopted the atheist position that creation is a religious myth.

In speaking for the majority, Justice William J. Brennan wrote: “The legislative history
documents that the act’s primary purpose was to change the science curriculum of public
schools in order to provide an advantage to a particular religious doctrine that rejects the
factual basis of evolution in its entirety.”

The learned Justice seemed unaware that some of the world’s greatest scientists were and
are devout Christians and, that dogmatic atheism, not religion, is destroying true science.
Also, though his job requires him to uphold the Constitution, Justice Brennan willfully
ignored the historical fact that, to the Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution, an
“establishment of religion” meant a state church, such as they have in England with the
Anglican Church, which is the official church of England.
Belief in God is not the same thing as establishing an official government-sponsored
religious denomination. Belief in a supernatural being who created mankind is not an
establishment of religion.

What exactly is the Theory of Evolution? For the answer, we must go to the source:
Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the
Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, published in 1859. In his book,
whose racist subtitle has been suppressed in modern editions for obvious reasons, Darwin
claimed that the thousands of different species of animals, insects, and plants that exist on
earth were not the works of a Divine Creator who made each of the “kinds” in its present
immutable form, as described in Genesis (e.g., frogs produce frogs, not princes), but are
the products of a very long natural process of development from simpler organic forms to
more complex organisms.

Thus, according to Darwin, species continue to change or “evolve,” through a process of
natural selection in which nature’s harsh conditions permit only the fittest to survive in
more adaptable forms. However, while controlled breeding can produce varieties inside
the dog species, from Chihuahuas to Great Danes, dogs are still dogs. “Survival of the
fittest” is incapable of turning one species into another. Whatever external conditions we
may provide for a dog, these will not change its basic dog DNA.
Darwin also believed that all life originated from a single source – a kind of primeval
slime in which the first living organisms formed spontaneously out of non-living matter
through a random process – by accident.

The first false idea in Darwin’s hypothesis is that non-organic matter can transform itself
into organic matter. Although this belief in “spontaneous generation” was common at the
time, Pasteur and others have conclusively disproved it. Life does not arise from non-life
at the macro level, and at the micro level all the laboratory experiments that claim to
produce “building blocks” of life have failed to do so, in spite of all the hype to the
contrary. See the book Icons of Evolution by Dr. Jonathan Wells for some eye-opening
debunking of this and other myths still taught in your local school’s textbooks.
Justice Brennan called evolution “factual,” which simply indicates the depth of his
ignorance. There is no factual basis to evolution. The fossil record shows no intermediary
forms of species development. We’ve never seen it happen, either. No scientist has been
able to mate a cat with a donkey and get something in between. And modern genetics has
shown us that we need complex “programs” to grow from a single cell into a human
being. But mutations, which destroy information, can’t add more complexity to
succeeding generations. So neither Darwin’s simplistic belief in the inheritance of
acquired characteristics nor our newer knowledge of genetics provides any way
species-to-species evolution could ever happen.
The enormous complexity of organic matter precludes accidental creation. There had to
be a designer.

There is now a whole scientific school devoted to the design theory. William A.
Dembski’s book, Intelligent Design, published in 1999, is the pioneering work that
bridges science with theology. Dembski writes:
“Intelligent design is three things: a scientific research program that investigates the
effects of intelligent causes; an intellectual movement that challenges Darwinism and its
naturalistic legacy; and a way of understanding divine action. It was Darwin’s expulsion
of design from biology that made possible the triumph of naturalism in Western culture.
So, too, it will be intelligent design’s restatement of design within biology that will be the
undoing of naturalism in Western culture.”

Dembski proves that design is “empirically detectable,” because we can observe it all
around us. The birth of a child is a miracle of design. The habits of your household cat
are a miracle of design. All cats do the same things. These are the inherited
characteristics of the species. The idea that accident could create such complex behavior
passed on to successive generations simply doesn’t make sense. The complexity of design
proves the existence of God. Dembski writes:

“Indeed within theism divine action is the most basic mode of causation since any other
mode of causation involves creatures which themselves were created in a divine act.
Intelligent design thus becomes a unifying framework for understanding both divine and
human agency and illuminates several long-standing philosophical problems about the
nature of reality and our knowledge of it.”

So why are the courts and the schools so fanatically opposed to even allowing children to
know there are arguments against evolution? Because evolution provides the perfect
“scientific” excuse for keeping the God of the Bible out of public education. It’s not the
idea of design per se that worries them; it’s Who the Designer is. That’s why the media
are showing increasing support for the “life came from outer space” theory and even the
“life came from intelligent aliens who seeded our planet” theory. Evolution is tottering,
and the search is on for any Designer except the real one.

So, while what the Intelligent Design movement has to say can be helpful, let’s just
remember that the real issue is not whether there was a Designer or just a bunch of
Random Accidents, but whether the God of the Bible created the universe just like it says
in Genesis or not.