Expelled: An embarrassment to the Academy

 By Steve Cornell

http://thinkpoint.wordpress.com/

The harsh criticism aimed at Ben Stein's documentary Expelled serve only to substantiate the concerns raised by the film. Stein "...calls attention to the plight of highly credentialed scholars who have been forced out of prestigious academic positions because they proposed Intelligent Design as a possible alternative to Charles Darwin’s 150-year-old theories about the origins of life. Instead of entertaining a debate on the merits of competing theories, the scientific establishment has moved to suppress the ID movement in a “systematic and ruthless” way at odds with America’s founding principles, the film asserts” (Jill Stanek, WorldNetDaily).

Opponents of intelligent design wrongly insist that it’s the same as biblical creationism. Don’t be fooled by this diversionary argument. Intelligent design is not code language for teaching biblical creationism. It is the study of signs of intelligence in the natural world. As a discipline, it doesn’t require the God revealed in Christian scriptures as the designer. The fact that many who believe in intelligent design also believe that “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1), should not be used to discredit the scientific method.

Scientific inquiry should always be empirical research that follows the evidence wherever it leads. Unfortunately, in the academy, much of what passes for science is driven by a philosophy of materialism. On this account, acceptable research must begin with “in the beginning there was only particles and impersonal natural laws.” This kind of “science” rules out of order intelligent design no matter what the evidence shows.

Yet empirically detecting design is common to many other disciplines. In her new book, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity, Nancy Pearcey identifies other disciplines that depend on discovery of design. “Detectives are trained to distinguish murder (design) from death by natural causes. Archeologists have criteria for distinguishing when a stone has the distinctive chip marks of a primitive tool (design), and when its shape is simply the result of weathering and erosion. Insurance companies have steps for deciding whether a fire was a case of arson (design) or just an accident. Cryptologists have worked out procedures to determine whether a set of symbols is a secret message (design) or just an accident.”

Using the same principles found in each of these disciplines, scientist are capable of distinguishing products of nature from products of intelligence. This is simply the way most people understand the world. Pearcey offers several examples: “Walking on the beach, we may admire the lovely pattern of ripples running across the sand, but we know it is merely a product of the wind and the waves.  If, however, we come across a sand castle with walls and turrets and a moat, do we assume it too was created by the wind and waves? Of course not. The material constituents of the castle are nothing but sand and mud and water, just like the ripples all around it. But we intuitively recognize that those starting materials have a different kind of order imposed upon them. A friend of mind once took a ship up the West Coast to Canada, where he was greeted by a colorful display of flowers spelling out, ‘Welcome to Victoria.’ It was a sure guarantee that the seeds were not blown there randomly by the wind.”

In his book The Design Revolution: Answering Tough Questions about Intelligent Design, William A. Dembski explained that, “As a theory of biological origins and development,” explained Dembski, “intelligent design’s central claim is that only intelligent causes adequately explain the complex, information-rich structures of biology and that these causes are empirically detectable. To say intelligent causes are empirically detectable is to say there are well-defined methods that, based on observable features of the world, can reliably distinguish intelligent causes from undirected natural causes.”

Every critic of intelligent design I’ve met has admitted never reading any work by a leading proponent of it. This is academic dishonesty. To be fair, many who believe in creation also speak carelessly about evolution. They fail to respect the difference between the scientific evidence of evolution within nature and the unscientific use of evolution as a philosophy of ultimate origins.

When critics of intelligent design cry, “Creationism!” and advocates chant, “Evolution is just a theory”, no progress is made toward better understanding. Intellectual integrity requires one to research a viewpoint before critiquing it. Expelled demonstrates the exclusionary bias against the science of intelligent design. I can only hope it serves as an embarrassment to much of the academic community. It is simply impossible to have a profitable discussion when otherwise intelligent people substitute thoughtful analysis for condescending ridicule. Let’s expel the bias so that we can have thoughtful debate. 

Steven W. Cornell
Senior pastor
Millersville Bible Church
Millersville, PA. 17551