mathematician, theologian, computer scientist, writer, philosopher
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Intelligent design is a modest position theologically and philosophically. It attributes the complexity and diversity of life to intelligence, but does not identify that intelligence with the God of any religious faith or philosophical system.
As far as design theorists are concerned, theistic evolution is American evangelicalism's ill-conceived accommodation to Darwinism.
Design theorists are no friends of theistic evolution.
The question rather is how we should do science and theology in light of the impending collapse of Enlightenment rationalism and scientific naturalism. These ideologies are on the way out. They are on the way out.
My thesis is that all disciplines find their completion in Christ and cannot be properly understood apart from Christ.
If we take seriously the word-flesh Christology of Chalcedon (i.e., the doctrine that Christ is fully human and fully divine) and view Christ as the telos toward which God is drawing the whole of creation, then any view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient.
Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners do not have a clue about him.
The scientific picture of the world championed since the Enlightenment is not just wrong but massively wrong. Indeed entire fields of inquiry, especially in the human sciences, will need to be rethought from the ground up in terms of intelligent design.
Intelligent Design opens the whole possibility of us being created in the image of a benevolent God.
The job of apologetics is to clear the ground, to clear obstacles that prevent people from coming to the knowledge of Christ.... And if there's anything that I think has blocked the growth of Christ as the free reign of the Spirit and people accepting the Scripture and Jesus Christ, it is the Darwinian naturalistic view.... It's important that we understand the world. God has created it; Jesus is incarnate in the world.
The world is a mirror representing the divine life...
The mechanical philosophy was ever blind to this fact. Intelligent design, on the other hand, readily embraces the sacramental nature of physical reality. Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.
I think the opportunity to deal with students and getting them properly oriented on science and theology and the relation between those is going to be important because science has been such an instrument used by the materialists to undermine the Christian faith and religious belief generally.
This is really an opportunity to mobilize a new generation of scholars and pastors not just to equip the saints but also to engage the culture and reclaim it for Christ. That's really what is driving me.
In the next five years, molecular Darwinism—the idea that Darwinian processes can produce complex molecular structures at the subcellular level—will be dead. When that happens, evolutionary biology will experience a crisis of confidence because evolutionary biology hinges on the evolution of the right molecules. I therefore foresee a Taliban-style collapse of Darwinism in the next ten years. Intelligent design will of course profit greatly from this.
Thus, in a crucial way, the Kansas hearings repeat the pattern set by the Scopes Trial, which has been repeated many times since, namely, evolutionists escaped critical scrutiny by not having to undergo cross-examination. In this case, they accomplished the feat by boycotting the hearings. I therefore await the day when the hearings are not voluntary but involve subpoenas that compel evolutionists to be deposed and interrogated at length on their views.
What I propose, then, is a strategy for interrogating the Darwinists to, as it were, squeeze the truth out of them.
Thus, in its relation to Christianity, intelligent design should be viewed as a ground-clearing operation that gets rid of the intellectual rubbish that for generations has kept Christianity from receiving serious consideration.
Even many Christians who have been raised and indoctrinated in a secular mindset … will say, 'Look, we're just going to have to accept the science of the day and try to make our peace with it theologically.' … And there is no peace theologically … ultimately with this view [Darwinian evolution]. But they accept it. And so, this idea of intelligent design becomes very threatening.
The mountains of evidence are already there. The problem is that evidence is itself inherently hermeneutical, influenced by cognitive predispositions to interpret certain types of data as supporting/confirming certain types of conclusions. If one wears materialistic blinders, there can be no evidence for ID hence the constant refrain by people like Barbara Forrest and Eugenie Scott that there is no evidence for ID. There is none for them because they have shut their eyes to it.
Intelligent design, unlike creationism, is a science in its own right and can stand on its own feet.
I'm not saying that atheists can't act morally or have moral knowledge. But when I ascribe virtue to an atheist, it's as a theist who sees the atheist as conforming to objective moral values. The atheist, by contrast, has no such basis for morality. And yet all moral judgments require a basis for morality, some standard of right and wrong.