Syndicated Article Presents Opinion as Fact
BY WILLIAM DEMBSKI AND JONATHAN WITT
In a recent news story, Alexandra Witze writes, “Although intelligent design is not scientific …” That’s highly misleading. In a supposedly fair and accurate news story about this growing controversy, Witze presents as fact a key point of contention in the debate.
Although public science education and the vast majority of science documentaries present only the strengths of Darwin’s theory, design theorists are patiently assembling a minority report based on scientific evidence: (1) Only intelligent causes adequately explain information-rich structures like the intricate world of the cell; (2) these causes are empirically detectable; and (3) there exist well-defined methods, based on observable features of the world, that can reliably distinguish intelligent from impersonal causes.
With the evidence against them, Darwinists increasingly have responded with a question-begging definitional game. Science only deals with natural causes, they assert. That’s a bit like trying to settle the pro-baseball controversy over designated hitters by yelling, “Pitchers, by definition, don’t hit!” Please, let’s drop the question-begging and follow the evidence wherever it leads. An astonishing world of complex circuits, molecular machines, and digital code awaits us.