Article from the BUC Newsletter - 23^rd Dec, 2005

This week the subject of Intelligent Design (ID) has been in the international news as a judge in the town of Dover, Pennsylvania, ruled that a school wanting to teach ID as an alternative to evolution would be violating the American constitutional ban on teaching religion in public schools.

Here in the UK, as far back as September of this year, the subject featured in a Guardian article written by popular evolutionists Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne. In a ferocious attack they dismissed ID as a “disingenuous euphemism,” which was, in their view, “simply creationism camouflaged with a new name”.

Among the many supporters of ID, and particularly in the smaller subset of creationists, the article provoked an angry reaction. Many Seventh-day Adventists who read the article were appalled at the use of a supposedly scientific approach to discredit and poor scorn upon the theory of ID, simply because it dared to offer an alternative to evolutionism.

After considering the ensuing discussions one Adventist scientist, Dr John Walton, Professor of Reactive Chemistry at of the University of St Andrews, began to prepare a reasoned response to the Dawkins and Coyne article. On Tuesday of this week, 20 December 2005, that response, entitled “Origins Science Needs Design Rehab”, was sent to the Guardian newspaper.

In his 3,000 word article Walton raises a number of issues which have not been adequately dealt with by evolutionists, even though they are aware of them and have been promising answers to them for many years. For many scientifically minded Christians, some of whom may have been preparing to roll over and accept the full compass of evolution simply on the weight of the number of its proponents, Walton’s arguments will come as welcome relief.

For example there is the fundamental issue of “irreducible complexity” - the fact that for “biological machines to work, all (or most) of the molecular parts are needed at once, i.e. the complexity cannot be reduced to some much simpler state.” This is related to the familiar “missing links” issue. “For over a century evolutionary scientists have been promising that laboratory science will someday discover a quantifiable mechanism for evolutionary change,” says Walton. However, apart from changes of the “finch beak” kind, which simply illustrate the micro-evolutionary changes that are easily observable in nature, “verifiable laboratory evidence is completely absent.”

Walton’s strongest criticisms of the Dawkins and Coyne article however, concern the inability of evolutionists to apply scientific objectivity to their own field. “The oft repeated dictum ‘evolution is fact’ has become a password ritually affirmed by orthodox Darwinians,“ Walton says. ”Dawkins and

the majority of his evolutionary peers automatically rule out ID on ... philosophical grounds and consider it a waste of time to evaluate the evidence.”

But new conceptual tools, which give measurable criteria for detecting design, should encourage scientists to re-evaluate their position. Walton highlights the work of William Dembski who “demonstrated that systems exhibiting high complexity combined with ‘specification’ are always produced by intelligent agents.” Dembski discussed just what is meant by ‘specification’ by referring to a dart board and concluded that: “It turns out that nature, and particularly biology, is equivalent to a long series of bullseyes that have all been hit by darts.”

Note: Although Walton's article is unlikely to be printed in full by the Guardian it can be seen on the BUC website www.adventist.org.uk by following the link on the front page.