	Bob Hostetler > Writing

True Believers

by Bob Hostetler

In an interview at the White House on Monday with a group of Texas newspaper reporters, President Bush expressed support for the teaching of intelligent design along with evolution in America’s public schools.

Stressing that curriculum decisions are best made by local districts, the president said, “Both sides ought to be properly taught . . . so people can understand what the debate is about.” As reporters continued to question him, he added, “Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought. . . . You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes.”

Predictably, the president’s remarks pleased proponents of intelligent design and ignited criticism from its opponents. The Washington Post reported:

John G. West, an executive with the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank supporting intelligent design, issued a written statement welcoming Bush's remarks. "President Bush is to be commended for defending free speech on evolution, and supporting the right of students to hear about different scientific views about evolution," he said.

And the New York Times quoted Susan Spath, a spokeswoman for the National Center for Science Education, a group that defends the teaching of evolution in public schools. “Intelligent design is a sectarian religious viewpoint,” she said. “It’s not fair to privilege one religious viewpoint by calling it the other side of evolution.”

Simple, right? Science deals in facts; religion deals in faith. Apples and oranges. Oil and water.

Unless you pay attention to what “scientists” say when they’re not comparing Darwinism to Intelligent Design. They are guided—fundamentally—not by empiricism, but by the naturalistic presupposition that “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be,"[i] in the famous words of Carl Sagan. This is not a scientific conclusion, but a philosophical—even religious—belief.

Don’t take it from me; take it from William Provine of Cornell University, who “declares forthrightly that Darwinism is not just about mutations and fossils; it is a comprehensive philosophy stating that all life can be explained by natural causes acting randomly—which implies that there is no need for a Creator.”

Concerning the father of modern evolutionary theory himself, Charles Colson writes:

Darwin is typically portrayed as a man forced to the theory of natural selection by the weight of the facts. But today historians recognize that he was first committed to the philosophy of naturalism and then sought a theory to justify it scientifically….In other words, the deck was already stacked in favor of a naturalistic account of life before he actually uncovered any convincing facts.[ii]

Not only that, but Darwin’s earliest apologists displayed enthusiasm for his theory not because it was good science (in fact, some of them openly disdained the science) but because they recognized it as an attractive alternative to the Biblical version. Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s most famous defender, who famously called himself “Darwin’s bulldog,” candidly wrote:

“[Darwin] did the immense service of freeing us forever from the Dilemma—Refuse to accept the creation hypothesis, and what have you to propose that can be accepted by any cautious reasoner?”[iii]

And D. M. S. Watson, known to the public for his B.B.C. talks popularizing Darwinism, declared to fellow biologists at a Cape Town conference, “Evolution itself is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or . . . can be proven by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.”[iv]

These are not only the historical and religious roots of evolutionary theory, but the contemporary stem and branches. Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin, while candidly acknowledging the sore limitations of Darwinism, says:

“In the struggle between science and the supernatural [we] take the side of science . . . Because we have a prior commitment to materialism [that is, naturalism].”[v]

In other words, despite the fact that nothing—absolutely nothing—in the history of the scientific method has been observed to come into being without being acted upon, the very definition of modern science (to some) requires a religious commitment to naturalistic faith. When you begin from an intellectual bias that shuts out the possibility of the supernatural, the transcendent, the infinite, you’re limiting your thinking, like a detective who will consider only the facts that support his preconceptions.

Darwin’s own son William said of his father, “As regards his respect for the laws of Nature, it might be called reverence if not a religious feeling.”[vi] As author Herbert Schlossberg says, “The scientific scabbards fall away to reveal ideological swords.”[vii]

So it’s not a cut-and-dried matter of religion vs. reason, faith vs. facts. Both the opponents and the proponents of Intelligent Design corral an impressive array of evidence to support their hypotheses (despite opponents’—and media—claims that “there is only one school of scientific thought, and that is evolution,” as the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said). Both believe in an uncaused cause, either material or spiritual. Both begin with a set of philosophical and religious presuppositions.

There’s no way to escape it. To assert that there is evidence of an intelligence that caused the natural world around us—including us—is no more religious than to insist that there could not have been. As philosopher Oswald Spengler wrote, there “is no natural science without a precedent Religion.”[viii]

Amen to that.

This article appeared in the August 5, 2005 edition of the Hamilton Journal-News.

More articles by Bob Hostetler...