Interesting article in WorldNetDaily about a PBS station in Albuquerque cancelling a program on intelligent design. The documentary, "Unlocking the Mystery of Life," is described as "a 58-minute program exploring what DNA reveals about the origin of life and documents how some scientists are skeptical about naturalistic explanations for the origin of genetic information and are looking to theories of design instead."
The story quotes Joan Rebecchi, the marketing manager for KNME, as saying "Our underwriting guidelines don't allow us to air programs that have a specific religious point of view." But this statement is curious because the program has aired, according to the article, in almost every top 2o market on other PBS stations.
It does point out a double standard. PBS would hardly be seen cancelling a documentary on evolution and justifying it by saying "Our underwriting guidelines don't allow us to air programs that have a specifically atheist point of view."
The notion remains intact in the acedemic and media elite communities that science and rationality cannot be in any way tied to theism, as if belief in God is a complete and total suspension of reason. Philip Johnson in "Darwin on Trial" pointed this tendency to put all theism in the prison of anti-rational superstition in discussing the 1981 Arkansas statute intended to allow creation-science in school classrooms overturned by Judge William Overton. Overton is saying that creation, or by inference design, is not science because it is not "explanatory by reference to natural law".
This is the central problem Intelligent design faces in attempting to gain a fair hearing. If science is defined as dealing only with that which is explainable by natural law, then by definition anything that suggests there is something beyond nature is not science. Evolution wins, not on the basis of evidence or logic, but by definition. This is the assumption many in society have, usually an unexamined assumption. Rationality is bound up with nature, anything beyond nature is therefore not rational. All matters of belief in anything beyond nature are thus shunted away to fields of inquiry that are outside the realm of "real" knowledge.
Moving beyond mere Intelligent Design to more specific theological matters, Christianity is absolutely dependent on some level of reason and rationality. Yes it is assumed in Christianity that a supernatural being from time to time invades the natural world. But these invasions are not beyond the realm of testing and verification. If water was turned to wine, rational human beings could have tasted the wine. If a man born blind was healed, rational people who knew him before and after could attest to the change. Most entries into the natural realm by the Christian deity in the Old and New Testaments leave behind a trail of evidence. And that evidence can be examined.
Moving back to ID, here is where the ID debate needs clarification. What intelligent design purports to show is not that there is a specific God of a specific religion, necessarily. It simply claims that the evidence, the trail of clues, leads to a conclusion that what exists was designed and could not have come into existence without intelligence. Who that intelligence is and what that intelligence might be like are left open to other debates. Those debates are appropriately held in the realms of theology, philosophy and metaphysics. But the question of whether real data in the real world can show evidence of being specifically designed should not be sequestered away from the field of science, anymore than evidence which seems to indicate randomness or chance should be dismissed because it might support atheism.
No one who cares about rationality or academic freedom should allow ID theories to be cast aside based on a false notion that only theories that propose a naturalistic cause can even be considered by definition - thus not even allowing massive amounts of evidence to be considered.
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