Science and Faith: Friends or Foes?

A few clips from today’s article in the Baptist Press: Science and Faith: Friends or Foes?

Jay Richards, a senior fellow with the Center for Science and Culture and coauthor of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery, corrected opponents of the Intelligent Design movement who claim that it is merely religion disguised as science...

“There is not a doctrine of creation here,” [Richards said]..."Think of Intelligent Design generally as a research program that seeks to ask questions like this, 'Does nature display objective evidence of design or purpose?' It uses publicly available evidence from the natural world. It also includes, usually, some type of theory of design detection so that we can determine whether something is designed or not…"

"We have evidence of a definite beginning of the universe. We have evidence of design, of intelligent design, from the very beginning of the universe, built into the very fabric of the physical parameters that govern the universe as we know," [Stephen] Meyer said. "We have evidence of design arising later along the cosmic timeline, in the form of irreducibly complex biochemical machines [and] in the form of the origin of life and the information required for that event to occur..."

Political scientist John West elaborated on the implications of scientific materialism and Darwin's evolutionary theory…

"It is a fair question to ask about the logical repercussions and logical implications of something like this," West said. "Ideas do have consequences. When you write ideas and you put them out in public, and especially when you yourself have put them out and applied them to things like morality and human beings and human dignity, there are consequences."

During the remainder of his lecture, West noted the social consequences of Darwin's materialistic evolutionary theory. He said the Darwinian denial of free will led courts to treat criminal behavior as a disease because people cannot help doing what they are programmed by evolution to do.

Concerning family life and human sexuality, Darwin argued that monogamy was useful for survival in 19th-century Britain, but he admitted that marriage customs could change if necessary for survival. More recently, some Darwinists have approved of child molestation based on this principle, West said. Darwin's concerns about allowing the weak people in human society to breed led to the development of eugenics, a term coined by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, who developed this practice of improving the human population by controlled breeding. Darwin's reasoning also has been used to justify abortion.

"Darwinism is proving to be a suffocating ideology," said [William] Dembski, research professor of philosophy at Southwestern Seminary and a senior fellow at the Center for Science and Culture.