The court’s opinion in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District declares, “Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general.” The court speaks repeatedly of this “false duality” and “contrived dualism.”
Natural selection is compatible with the idea that a supreme being created life in a one-celled organism and then stepped aside. Darwin’s description of life as “having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one” hinted at this quasi-deist vision. The mechanism that evolutionary biologists posit to explain later developments, however, attributes all life forms other than the first to random mutation against an environmental background composed, in significant part, of other life forms shaped by random mutation. Complex life forms are the product of a mindless rather than a purposeful process. All of our own species’ characteristics, mental and physical, exist only because, at some point, they furthered our ancestors’ reproductive success. Although evolution itself poses no challenge to the idea that a purposeful process shaped life as it grew more complex, natural selection does. The emergence of humans and hippopotamuses from a one-celled organism over the course of 3.5 billion years could not have been the product of both a purposeful process and an entirely random process. Try as one might to embrace both theism and Darwinism, purpose and chance remain antithetical. Well-meaning efforts to bridge the chasm fail whenever it rains.