Ben Stein, Darwin and Intelligent Design

Ben Stein is my latest hero.

By going to bat against Darwinist dogma with the new documentary "Expelled", he has almost certainly committed career suicide, at least as far as acting goes. No-one in Hollywood is going to work with a darling of the religious right.

Clearly, he already knows what to expect, and has made his peace with it. In a recent interview with WORLD magazine, he predicted the film and it's producers will be "mocked and belittled" for their efforts. He's right. I know from personal experience how patronizing and indeed, ENRAGED some people become when one dares to suggest that evolution is a grand theory, but not a proven fact.

But Stein is not simply out to throw mud at the theory of Evolution. He is also promoting the work of the Intelligent Design movement, a network of Darwin-doubting scientists and intellectuals who make the case that Nature bears numerous evidences of an intelligent agent/designer (yes, that God guy.) For their sacrilege, the I.D. people are reviled by their secular peers as creationist hacks, even though what they're saying has been said before by the likes of Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and a host of others (even Darwin himself.)

The sad thing is that some of the vitriol headed Stein's way will be coming from liberal Christian circles. These well-meaning people have joined the charge to brand Intelligent Design as "pseudo-science" and ban it from the classroom. They will explain that there is no conflict between their Faith and their belief in Darwinism; God set evolution in motion in order to create the species as we know them. Problem solved! Well, that's not a bad theory but they don't seem to realize they're describing a form of Intelligent Design! A creator God acting with intent. This is categorically NOT where the scientific establishment is coming from.

Most scientists will admit that they are exclusively committed to theories and explanations which exclude God (Naturalistic explanations.) In other words, if they did literally uncover evidence of something supernatural, they would automatically assume an error or explain it away in naturalistic terms. This is an a priori prejudice. They have already decided that Science will never find evidence of God, therefore they reject as "Religious Writing" and therefore "not Science", any study which infers God's existence.

By now you know pretty well where I stand, but I'd like to clarify my beliefs before being pigeonholed as something I'm not. Yes, I am a "Creationist", in that I believe God created Nature and the Universe. I am also not a Darwinist (microevolution, yes; macroevolution, I don't see it.) I believe God introduced the species fully formed. However, I take a more "nuanced" (hate that word) position than many on my side of the fence. For instance, I have no problem believing the world is very, very old. I believe the six "days" of creation in Genesis may not be literal, and could easily refer to vast epochs (not that God couldn't have done it 6 days, mind you). I am also open to the possibility that some species may have become extinct very early (yes, Dinosaurs) and that Death may have existed in the animal and plant worlds before the Fall of Man.