Edward “Ted” Davis, professor of the history and philosophy of science and director of the Central Pennsylvania Forum for Religion and Science at Messiah College, lectured to close to 100 people on “Intelligent Design on Trial” Thursday evening at Franklin & Marshall College.

Because Messiah is 15 miles from Dover High School and 15 miles from the federal courthouse in Harrisburg, Davis said he set aside his academic life the past year to concentrate on the Dover School Board trial that pitted Darwinian evolution against intelligent design. He wrote an article for the national magazine, Religion in the News, on his observations of the trial.

Davis said Thursday there is “much confusion” over what intelligent design is relative to creationism at the popular level.

“(Intelligent design) is a movement with political and cultural goals, heavily influenced by religion and aimed at toppling Darwinism in the broadest mind-set,” Davis said. “It is a set of ideas about detecting design within science, coupled with a critique of Darwinism.”

Intelligent design is “not creationism, despite (U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III’s) decision that it is the ‘progeny of creationism’ and testimony leading to it. It clearly lacks crucial distinguishing features of creationism and specific religious concerns that drive creationism. There is no stance on central theological issues that drives creationism, like death before the fall,” Davis said.

Intelligent design does not “explain” the fossil record by claiming the biblical flood accounts for it, nor does it deny the big-bang theory, he said. Intelligent design also doesn’t deny the great antiquity of the earth and universe like creationism does.

Davis said intelligent design has been described as “creationism in a cheap tuxedo. That is just wrong.”

The intelligent design movement is a “big tent” under which there is plenty of room for differences of opinion about theological and biblical issues, Davis said.

Intelligent design does “resemble” creationism in its tone, however, he said.

“Evolution is often seen as a false scientific theory and as a leading cause of moral and spiritual decline in modern America,” Davis said.

However, intelligent design is not an alternative theory to evolution, he said. It doesn’t offer answers to questions as to how and when dinosaurs came into existence or how old the universe is. It has no “theory” to “teach” because it provides no alternative explanation of the history of the universe, Davis said.

“(Intelligence design) is a philosophical critique of the explanatory efficacy of evolution,” Davis said.

A key idea in the intelligent design movement is that design is evident in nature and science can detect it. A prime example is Mount Rushmore. It obviously wasn’t produced by nature, but it also wasn’t produced supernaturally, Davis said.

“It was nature operated with intelligence,” he said.

Other key ideas in the intelligent design movement is that design is evident in the universe itself, a fine-tuning of the cosmos, linked with big bang and strong anthropic philosophy; design is evident in “irreducible complexity” of cells; and design is evident in the Cambrian explosion, the big bang of biology.

A narrow goal of the intelligent design movement, Davis said, is to replace Darwinian evolution as the dominant paradigm in biology in this present generation, if not the next. And a wider goal is cultural transformation, he said.

One advocate of intelligent design, William Dembski, said challenging evolution and naturalism is “ground zero in the culture war,” Davis said.

Although Jones was impressed with evidence linking intelligent design with openly Christian efforts to influence the larger culture, the judge’s decision, nevertheless, may provide some “wiggle room” in teaching intelligent design in this state, Davis said.

Pennsylvania’s standards require students to learn the “nature of science,” a reference to aspects of the philosophy of science.

Because of the existence of refereed professional literature on intelligent design in the philosophy of science, Davis said, public school science teachers would have a legitimate secular purpose in discussing various philosophical objections to evolution that have been raised by scientists. blog comments powered by Disqus