Why teach Intelligent Design (ID)?

Our culture is dominated by a worldview that defines all religious and spiritual issues as personal, subjective, non-testable and non-rational, and limits truth to only that which exists in the natural realm and can be explained by natural mechanisms (i.e. naturalism, materialism, Darwinism).

Intelligent Design destroys the myth that science entails only naturalistic explanations. ID demonstrates that we can empirically study the signs of intelligence in nature which are evidence for an Intelligent Designer.

For example, the following areas of scientific endeavour all continue to reveal evidence for an Intelligent Designer:

• The Origin of the Universe
• The Probability of an Earth-like Planet – i.e fine-tuning
• The Origin of Life
• The Complexity of Life
• Genetics
• Irreducible Complexity in biological systems
• The success of reverse engineering of bilogical systems

Thus, in its relation to religion and esecially Judaism and Christianity, Intelligent Design should be viewed as a ground-clearing operation that gets rid of the intellectual error inherent in Darwinism and Naturalism, that for generations has kept any belief in the Creator, the God of Israel from receiving serious consideration.

Thomas Kuhn, in his 'Structure of Scientific Revolutions' clearly taught us that the old guard is not going to change its mind. By being wedded to a failing paradigm, they suffer from the misconceptions, blind-spots, and prejudices that invariably accrue to a dying system of thought.

Intelligent design is forcefully pointing out those failures.

Intelligent Design is making it much more intellectually acceptable to acknowledge the role of an Intelligent Designer in the creation of the universe from the Big Bang to all the creative innovation and genetic programming evident in Biological Systems.

Once naturalism/materialism is no longer seen as a very viable option, the belief in a Supreme Being, or evern more specifically, the God of Israel, once again becomes a reasonable option.

Thus ID should be seen by believers in the God of Israel as a support to their beliefs.

ID in the classroom should help open minds to the notion of a Creator who made space and time out of nothing as outlined in Genesis. A Creator who, from the growing evidence supporting the Anthropic Principle, is seen to not only care about human beings but to have made mankind the focus of the entire universe!