Chuck Colson weighs in on the Intelligent Design/Darwinism debate with an essay in Christianity Today. He notes that:
Sure, there's evidence that evolution takes place within a species-but the fossil record has not yielded evidence of one species becoming another, as Darwin confidently predicted. This lack of evidence has not gone unnoticed by sociologist Rodney Stark. Stark calls himself neither an evolutionist nor an advocate of Intelligent Design; instead, he says, he is merely a scholar pursuing the evidence where it leads. In For the Glory of God (Princeton University Press, 2003), Stark offers startling evidence that Darwinists have covered up mounting flaws in their theory.
He concludes that the battle over evolution is hardly a case of "heroic" scientists fighting off the persecution of religious fanatics. Instead, from the start, evolution "has primarily been an attack on religion by militant atheists who wrap themselves in the mantle of science in an effort to refute all religious claims concerning a creator-an effort that has also often attempted to suppress all scientific criticisms of Darwin's work."
Committed Darwinists continue this strategy today. For example, nine years ago biochemist Michael Behe published Darwin's Black Box (Free Press, 1996). Behe argued that complex structures like proteins cannot be assembled piecemeal, with gradual improvement of function. Instead, like a mousetrap, all the parts-catch, spring, hammer, and so forth-must be assembled simultaneously, or the protein doesn't work.
Behe's thesis faced a challenge from the nation's leading expert on cell structure, Dr. Russell Doolittle at the University of California-San Diego. Doolittle cited a study on bloodletting in the journal Cell that supposedly disproved Behe's argument. Behe immediately read the article-and found that the study proved just the opposite: It supported his theory. Behe confronted Doolittle, who privately acknowledged that he was wrong-but declined to make a public retraction.
So who's really rolling back the Enlightenment? Those who invite us to follow the evidence wherever it leads-or those demanding that we ignore it? The folks who want both evolution and Intelligent Design taught in school, with all their strengths and weaknesses-or those who attempt to silence any opposition?
Darwinians act like medieval clerics whose religion is under attack. The best way to preserve it is to insulate it against scrutiny. They "must not let a divine foot in the door", as Richard Lewontin famously put it. Their worst nightmare is not that natural selection will be unable to withstand careful examination as a mechanism of change, but rather that the metaphysical underpinnings of Darwinism, the dogma, for instance, that natural processes are by themselves sufficient to explain the origin and diversification of life, will dissolve in a trice once they are immersed in the acids of free inquiry.
The Darwinians are not defending their science. Indeed, it is not their science that is in question. It is the philosophical assumptions of atheistic materialism that are woven into their science that they strive to defend, and they know that, if they allow students to examine the philosophical alternatives, materialism will suffer in the comparison. No one wants to see his religion discredited, especially when, like the Darwinians, they've invested their entire professional lives in its credibility, and so they fight like desperate zealots to prevent our public schools from exposing young people to the challenges that Intelligent Design presents. Don't question, just believe is the Darwinian mantra, a mantra suitable for fundamentalist mullahs and others who fear the consequences of free and open inquiry.
Check out the rest of what Colson says at the Christianity Today site.
