Intelligent Design agrees with Scientific Evidence

I am teaching my class about history today and we were discussing the different views of history through the centuries. Before the nineteenth century there was "sacred history" in which people viewed history specifically through the lens of the Bible and church teachings. Sacred history suggests that the earth is only 6,000 years old. Thus dinosaurs, neanderthal man, and humans must somehow fit into this timeline. Creation theory is the only thing that can explain these events in less than six thousand years. Historian Dan Smail claims that although hard sciences have successfully cast off the residue of sacred history....history itself, has not. I would agree with him.

Creation theory dominated the early twentieth century precisely because of its allegiance with a literal interpretation of the Bible and a six thousand year model. But in 1925 the famous Scopes Monkey trial saw atheist lawyer Clarence Darrow get fundamentalist Christian William Jennings Bryan to admit that the Bible could not be interpreted literally. Although Darrow lost the case, creation theory and the six thousand year timeline lost credibility and thus lost legitimacy for the rest of the twentieth century. Science and liberal politicians could easily point to Bryan and the scientific evidence that undisputedly demonstrated that the earth was much older than six thousand years. For a scientific explanation of how old the earth is...with sources click here. This helped push creation doctrine and Christian evangelical influence underground for sometime. Without a legitimate explanation of creationism, Christian evangelical politics also lost significant influence. This has encouraged some to recast the fundamentalist argument; it is shifting from the position that liberalism thwarted fundamentalism and pushed it underground to the idea that fundamentalists voluntarily gave up their position in the public sphere....they withdrew from politics they were not forced from it.

Although evangelicalism began reconstituting itself almost immediately after the Scopes Trial debacle, it would take several decades to regain cultural and political capital. Evangelicals eventually succeeded in doing such through their introduction of intelligent design. Intelligent design claims that the universe is so complex that it had to be designed by a higher power, namely god. But there is no evidence of this and the theory is not falsifiable and thus it is outside the realm of science. Accompanying the doctrine of intelligent design has been the accumulation of cultural capital by evangelicals during the last two decades of the twentieth century. In the minds of many evangelicals, intelligent design is a legitimate scientific theory that competes with evolutionary theory. Scientists are quick to dismiss intelligent design from public discourse because it fails to the criteria of scientific theory. But I think we should listen to the intelligent design people. We do not have to agree with them, but the scientists should not get so huffy about their assertions.

In essence the doctrine of intelligent design admits that science has been right all along. The doctrine abandons the traditional fundamentalist evangelical idea that the earth is only six thousand years old; it explicitly accepts that the earth is billions of years old. This does not prove or disprove evolution or intelligent design nor should it be such an acrimonious debate; it is rather an opening for dialogue between science and religion. This has not happened for almost a century but religious and scientific people agree on one issue, the earth's age. Intelligent design has moved evangelicals away from the six thousand year model of sacred history. The intelligent design thinkers have done this as a way to counter the debacle in 1925. With this doctrine, they are reclaiming some lost cultural capital. Instead of another Scopes Trial to kill off the doctrine of intelligent design, I think we should have an open dialogue between the two camps and see where it leads us. We just might find out that science and religion have more in common than we once thought. This does not mean that intelligent design should be taught in public schools but it does mean that it should be debated in peer reviewed journals with honest intellectual criticism willing to debate the hegemony of the scientific method and the self-righteousness of evangelicals.