Thursday, October 29, 2009

Intelligent Design Expelled


My baby brother, Timmy Paine, came to live with us temporarily as he moved to this state to begin a new job and set up his own home here. As I have not seen him in several years, it has been good to catch up on many things with him. Well last night he made some of his patented special popcorn and rented Ben Stein’s movie, Expelled. Then my sweet wife, baby daughter, Uncle Timmy, the dog, and I all sat down to watch it. Being a huge fan of Ben Stein anyway, I had great expectations, and I was not disappointed. Now this movie came out in 2008, but is very relevant and topical today.

Basically in this movie Ben Stein meets and interviews many scientists and professors that are both for and against intelligent design theory. He further goes on to report how many of these world class scientists that do espouse or even look at the possibility of intelligent design in their research or teaching have been excommunicated from academia and are made out as pariahs in the scientific world.


This, I found extremely interesting and yet sad, as I thought the purpose of science was to do research and experimentation and go to wherever the data took you in your conclusions. Instead, there are many people, particularly in academia, that have a preconceived notion and refuse to even acknowledge the possibility of any contrary evidence that goes against their seemingly political/anti-God agenda, despite the fact that there are HUGE holes in many of their theories that intelligent design does indeed help to explain.

For instance, most of the anti-intelligent designers are ardent subscribers to Darwinian theory. Never mind the fact that there are monumental holes in much of the macro-evolution theories that Darwin espoused in his work. To point out those flaws and suggest anything even tangentially associated with intelligent design is to become an apostate to science for these closed-minded “scientists”. Many of these “apostates” are then black-listed from teaching or getting research grants for any university after having come out of the “God-closet”.

With my exceptionally limited knowledge, even I can poke serious holes in Darwinism, let alone these world class scientists that offer up plausible explanations that debunk the more, shall we say, questionable parts of his work. Now I will buy evolution on a micro scale. That is to say, I see how a single species can change and improve via natural selection etcetera over time to become a more evolved and better version of the same species; however, you cannot convince me scientifically that all living species were propagated from one single species that in turn climbed out of the primordial soup when lightning struck it and gave a single cell its life.


For the amino acids and proteins necessary to form in the proper sequence so that one single living cell can come into being just by happenstance and chance, the odds approach near infinity. For this to happen repeatedly to form a complex organism that lives, breathes, and reproduces reaches the point of being completely inconceivable. Further, where is the transitional fossils between species if this actually happened? It takes a greater leap of faith, in my mind, to see how a trilobite, Tyrannosaur and tiger all evolved from a common ancestor.

This begs the question then; if sheer chance didn’t initially create life which flourished into all of its diversity and complexity, then who or what did? There certainly and, to my mind, undeniably is an absolute design to the complexity of our life forms, our ecosystem, our planet, our solar system, and our universe.


To those of us of faith, God and His intelligent design of all answers those questions in harmony with science. Those that deny intelligent design as even a possibility and stubbornly subscribe to the flawed theories of Darwinism are the ones that seemingly cling to something bordering on a false religion.


Were Charles Darwin alive today forming his theories, instead of a time around the civil war, and had modern knowledge of molecular biology, chemistry, and even the existence of something as fundamental to genetics as DNA, I suspect that even HE would no longer be a Darwinist. But perhaps I am just being stubborn in my beliefs….

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