Evolution vs. Intelligent Design by Samuel 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."

Of course, no one bothered to remind the learned justice that some of the world's greatest scientists were and are devout Christians, and that it is atheism that is destroying true science, not religion. Also, Justice Brennan seemed to be totally unaware that an "establishment of religion" meant a state-sanctioned church, such as they have in England with the Anglican Church, which is the official Church of England. Belief in God is not an establishment of religion. Belief in a supernatural being who created mankind is not an establishment of religion.

Also, there is no factual basis to key tenets of evolutionary theory. The fossil record shows no intermediary forms of species development. No scientist has been able to mate a dog with a donkey and get something in between.

But homeschoolers, although not affected by what the court forces on government schools, should know how to refute the fairy tale called the Theory of Evolution. Justice Brennan called it fact, which simply indicates the depth of his ignorance.

First, what exactly is the Theory of Evolution? For the answer, we must go to the source: Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, published in 1859. 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 species in its present immutable form, as described in Genesis, 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.

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 the theory is that non-organic matter can transform itself into organic matter. Pasteur proved that this was impossible. Second, 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 is 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 also notes:

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 longstanding philosophical problems about the nature of reality and our knowledge of it.

Intelligent design is certainly proven by the fact that every living organism lives through a programmed cycle of birth, growth and, finally, death. That very specific program is contained in the tiniest embryo at the time of conception. The embryo of a cow probably does not look any different from the embryo of a human being. But each has been programmed differently: one creates a cow, the other a human being.

In the case of the latter, that tiny embryo contains an incredibly complex biological program that causes the individual to be born, pass through infancy and childhood, develop into maturity, middle age, old age and, finally, death - a process that takes sometimes as much as a hundred years. How can an accident know what is going to happen 100 years after it has happened?

But since intelligent design infers the existence of a designer - God - it is likely that evolutionists will resist any change in their views, since the acknowledgment of the existence of God is too nightmarish for them to cotemplate.

© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com. Reprinted with permission. Dr. Samuel L. Blumenfeld is the author of eight books on education, including: Is Public Education Necessary? NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education," The Whole Language/OBE Fraud" and Homeschooling: A Parent's Guide to Teaching Children. His books are available on Amazon.com. Back issues of his incisive newsletter, The Blumenfeld Education Letter, are available online.

TSS

September / October 2005 The Sabbath Sentinel