David Harsanyi has a column at the Denver Post that is remarkable for its serendipity. He gets almost everything wrong regarding the recent controversy in Texas about teaching both sides of the debate over evolution and intelligent design and still winds up drawing the correct conclusion.
Harsanyi, like so many commenters before him, confuses ID with creationism, and then blasts creationism, fooling himself into thinking that his criticisms are relevant to ID. He also states, like so many others before him, that IDers are anti-evolution. This is simply false. IDers are anti-Darwinian evolution. They're anti-materialism, not anti-evolution, and indeed many of them are evolutionists of one sort or another themselves.
Despite what critics allege and the popular press thinks, the current controversy is not between ID proponents and evolutionists, it's not between science and religion nor science and faith. It's between advocates of two conflicting metaphysical worldviews. On the one side, deceptively draping itself in the mantle of science, are proponents of materialistic naturalism - the view that only natural, physical causes have operated in the creation of the universe and of life. Those on the other side hold to a version of metaphysical dualism and are convinced that the evidence discovered by science reveals signs of purpose and intelligence behind what we perceive. IDers take no position on how this mind operated, how long ago it designed the world, or whether the mind is that of the God of the Bible or of an inhabitant of some other universe. It simply claims that however the world and life came about in this universe, it wasn't by physical, natural processes and forces alone.
Mr. Harsanyi hasn't yet gotten to the point where he has discovered the significance of this distinction and finds it easier and more polemically effective to just conflate ID and creationism. Nevertheless, he admirably comes out in his essay on the side of teaching students both sides of the controversy, a view Darwinians find abhorrent, and for good reason. They know that once students start learning about the incredibly precise calibration of the cosmic forces and parameters and once they start seeing videos like these, very few of them are going to conclude that this world is just the result of a cosmic belch by blind forces and matter.
Perhaps if Mr. Harsanyi viewed some of this evidence himself he wouldn't make the sorts of uniformed claims that tarnish his column.
RLC
