A Proper Spanking

Tom Bethell takes George Will and Charles Krauthammer to the woodshed to administer a proper spanking for their recent columns deriding Intelligent Design and those who advocate it.

We recommend Bethell's entire article which closes with this:

The underlying problem, rarely discussed, is that the conclusions of evolutionism are based not on science, but on a philosophy: the philosophy of materialism, or naturalism. Living creatures, including human beings, are here on Earth, and we got here somehow. If atoms and molecules in motion are all that exist, then their random interactions must account for everything that exists, including us. That is the true underpinning of Darwinism. What needs to be examined in detail is not so much the religion behind intelligent design as the philosophy behind evolution.

It is indeed rarely discussed (though discussed perhaps ad nauseum here on Viewpoint) that ID and modern evolutionary theory are philosophical mirror images of each other. The task confronting the current generation of ID advocates is to repeat this fact sufficiently often that it eventually begins to take hold in the mind of even the most obdurate of newspaper editors and columnists. Perhaps then we will begin to make some progress toward having a serious public debate in this country over the relative merits of these two explanations for biological complexity.