The Union Leader (Manchester NH, February 02, 2001 Friday  EDITORIAL PAGE

(ANOTHER VIEW) Evolution and intelligent design do belong in the
classroom

BYLINE: GREGORY E.  REYNOLDS

    DR.  BARBARA STAHL'S piece titled "Teach evolution in science class,
creationism someplace else" (September, 2000) displays a remarkable lack
of awareness of the current debate on this issue within the scientific
community.

    Dr.  Stahl presents "creationism" as if it were a 19th century
idea.  She never explains why intelligent design has been returned, as she
laments, to center stage in the classroom.  The label "intelligent design"
is actually new and should not be confused with the views of 19th century
clergyman William Paley or creationism.

      Intelligent design has emerged in response to a mounting array of
evidence from cosmology, molecular biology and biochemistry which
challenges Neo-Darwinian evolutionary science at its
foundation.  Intelligent design's challenge to the "chance universe" of
Darwinism has not been developed by Christian theologians but from within
the scientific and academic establishment.  Molecular biologist Michael
Denton's "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis" (1985) and Berkeley law professor
Phillip E.  Johnson's "Darwin on Trial" (1991) represent a growing number
of articulate academic critiques of Neo-Darwinism.

    Dr.  Stahl claims that evolution is a matter of biological science
while intelligent design is "disguised as science."  However, evidence
shows that evolution is guilty of being a theory disguised as science; a
theory increasingly discredited by new scientific discovery.  The double
standard exhibited by the evolutionists' refusal to seriously consider the
challenge belies a narrow-mindedness hitherto thought possible only in
fundamentalist preachers defending the verdict of the Scopes trial.  The
fact that many Neo-Darwinian scientists have asserted that a "random
universe" is an hypothesis preferable to that of belief in a supernatural
design elucidates the nature of their commitment: faith!

    Darwinism is a theory based on a number of unproved assumptions that
do not adequately account for recent scientific discoveries.  The theory
itself in rooted in a philosophical commitment to naturalism which assumes
that all reality is ultimately physical or material and has developed its
present state of complexity by pure chance.  Thus mind or spirit is
reducible to material reality and God and religion are banished to the
land of irrelevance.

    Information theory poses one of the greatest challenges to
Neo-Darwinian orthodoxy.  Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer notes,
"While many outside origin-of-life biology may still invoke 'chance' as a
causal explanation for the origin of biological information, few serious
researchers still do."  Meyer uses probability research to consider the
"probabilistic hurdles that must be overcome to construct even one short
protein molecule of about 100 amino acids in length" by
chance.  Conclusion: one chance in 10 to the 130th power.  Biochemist
Michael Behe has compared these odds to "a blindfolded man finding a
single marked grain of sand, hidden in the Sahara Desert, not once, but three
times."  Behe's "Darwin's Black Box" (1996) explores the "irreducible
complexity" of the DNA code, of which Darwin knew nothing.

    Meyer concludes: "During the past 40 years, every naturalistic model
proposed has failed to explain the origin of information -- the great
stumbling block for materialistic scenarios.  Thus, mind or intelligence
or what philosophers call 'agent causation' now stands as the only known
cause capable of creating an information-rich system, including the coding
regions of DNA, functional proteins, and the cell as a whole . . .
Consequently, a growing number of scientists now suggest that the
information in DNA justifies making what probability theorist William
Dembski and Behe call "design inference."  . . . The materialistic science
we have inherited from the late 19th century, with its exclusive
conceptual reliance on matter and energy, could neither envision nor can it now
account for the biology of the information age."

    Evolutionary science makes the classic simplistic mistake of assuming
that the whole is the sum of its parts (the fallacy of composition). How,
for example, could the parts of the eye develop by "infinitesimally small
inherited variations, each profitable to the preserved being?"
Evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould posed the question: "What good is 5 percent of an
eye?"  He answers that it might be useful for something other than sight
or more likely, though not as good as 100 percent vision, it would be better
than no sight at all.  Phillip Johnson responds as a good lawyer: "The
fallacy in that argument is that '5 percent of an eye' is not the same as
'5 percent of normal vision.'  For an animal to have any useful vision at
all, many complex parts must be working together."  An automobile cannot
function at all with partially developed parts or without all of the
parts.

    Are our high school and college students aware of this new information
or the debate which it has spawned?  In most cases the answer is no!  A
case in point is the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment in which it was claimed
that the "building blocks of life," simple amino acids had been created in
a flask.  In the 1970s scientists began to conclude that the earth's early
atmosphere was not "hydrogen rich" but rather volcanic gases.  Place these
gases in the Miller-Urey apparatus and the experiment does not work.
Today there is a near consensus among geochemists on this.  However, in the high
school biology textbook used at Central High School, "Biology: The
Dynamics of Life" (Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 1998) it is stated: "The
'life-in-a-test-tube' experiment of Miller and Urey remains the
cornerstone of the theories of the origin of life.  Where is a discussion of Karl
Popper's famous "test of falsifiability" in this textbook?  This is only
one of a large number of out of date information presented to our students
as fact. The science classroom should be a place where the tools of
critical thinking and intellectual honesty are learned.  Among the things
which ought to be taught are: the distinction between fact and theory; the
comparison of various theories of origin with the evidence; and the
existence among scientists of a raging debate about the theory of
evolution, especially in the disciplines of paleontology, biochemistry,
information theory and cosmology.  Let's teach them to think, not just
feed them outdated theories.

     -- Gregory Edward Reynolds is pastor of Amoskeag Presbyterian Church
in Manchester and headmaster of Granite State School of Theology and
Missions.