Knocking Intelligent Design

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            RELIGION IN THE NEWS

A report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media.   This week’s item is from The Stanford Daily , January 28, 2008 , with a headline:   “Hitchins Knocks Intelligent Design.”   The following are excerpts:   During an animated debate yesterday, atheist Christopher Hitchins, and Intelligent Design advocate J. Richards clashed over the evidence for God’s existence.   We are lucky, blessed I would say, to have two extremely smart people here today, host Ben Stein said, giving both participants 14 minutes for their opening remarks.   “Processes that require foresight are inaccessible to natural selection,” Richards said.   Hitchins then requested the chance to ask Richards a question.   Do you believe Jesus Christ was born of a virgin, he asked?   When Richards assented, “Do you believe He was resurrected from the dead?”   Richards said that he did.   “I rest my case,” said Hitchins; this is an honest guy who has just made it very clear that science has nothing to do with his world view.   Stein interrupted with a question for Hitchins.   “Many people are deeply religious, he said, are they just stupider that you?”   I think I’m smarter than most people, Hitchins said, but he added that it plays an important part in human history.   Religion was our first try at philosophy; it was our first try at epistemology.   It’s what we came up with when we didn’t know we lived on a round planet circling the sun.   Richards stated that just as the designers of Mount Rushmore made the monument very different from the hills around it, intelligent agents leave markers for their design.   The existence of a Creator God is something we can discern from the world around us, he concluded.   Hitchins disagreed.   The world as we know it works as the world might be expected to work if it did not have a designer.   He concluded we can finally grow up if we resign ourselves to this increasingly, inescapable truth.

            Tom:

Dave, this is your domain, so I don’t want to say too many things about it, except sometimes when I read the verse, “A fool has said in his heart, there is no God.”   Certainly Hitchins may be brilliant, but he also has a high view of himself.   And, you know, I’m not that bright a guy, but I think some of this stuff—(you mentioned in our last segment), some of the stuff is stupid, this is stupid!   I have a background in industrial design, I can recognize design when I see it, and I can recognize something that takes intelligence in order for it to come about.   You know, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to do that.   So, what’s his problem, Dave?

            Dave:

Tom, I’ll tell you what his problem is.   Let me quote Harvard professor, Nobel Prize winner, this is Dr. Walt, and he says, well, we know spontaneous generation doesn’t work.   We have the Law of Biogenesis.   The Law of Biogenesis is: life only comes from life.   We all believe that, we know it’s true, but if you can’t have spontaneous generation the only other alternative is a divine creative act, we’re not going to allow that.   So, here we are, as a result of spontaneous generation.   So Tom, they hate God.   We were talking about the Emerging Church people.   Well, this is rebellion.   They don’t want to go by the Bible.   I could quote you Alumita, he’s another atheist professor, brilliant guy, and he says we know you only have these two alternatives, and we will not, quoting him verbatim, “We will not allow a divine foot in the door.”   Okay, they are fools.   The fool has said in his heart, there is no God.   But the problem is they are rebels, they will not bow to God, and Hitchins— he loves to talk about this.   Well, you believe this divine dictatorship, God’s going to tell you whatever you’ve got to think and whatever you’re going to do, and even what you’re going to eat, and so forth, he twists the Bible.   But this is his problem, and in a debate I was just listening to this morning, Alister Crowley debating Hitchins.   He says: No, I don’t look upon this as a divine, as a heavenly dictatorship, it’s a heavenly liberator, this has liberated me.   And he was a communist, along with Hitchins, who also was, and an atheist, and he says I didn’t come to this from any emotional experience; I came to it based upon the evidence.   And those men who gave us science that we have today, like Newton .   Newton wrote more about the Bible than he wrote about science, but his book on mathematics is still today the greatest thing that’s ever been written out there.   So, these guys, Tom, they’re not bright, I mean, Hitchins is very bright, but they’re not bright enough to recognize the truth.  

            Tom:

Yeah, well, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

            Dave:

Right.

            Tom:

Now Dave, for me, for people like me, okay, give me a simple reason, make it as simple as you can, why I should believe in design—intelligent design?

            Dave:

Let me go to—we’re running out of time, very quickly, DNA, DNA is in writing, it is encoded—it can only be decoded by certain protein molecules.   Those protein molecules, they had to exist before DNA existed, but it is DNA that creates the protein molecules.   I can give you a hundred what came first, the chicken or egg.   Now it’s in writing, its information.   I have writing on a page right here in my Bible.   That is information.   It was not the ink or the paper that came up with this information.   Einstein himself said that matter cannot arrange itself into information.   And when you see information, look Tom, you have to have the instructions!   What these guys are trying to do, they are trying to build a structure without a foundation.   You ask them, well, how did it begin?   Where did the energy come from?   You’ve got a big band, where did the energy come from?   Well, where did the first life come from?   You cannot get a human cell.   They talk about evolution and natural selection, but you have to have a reproductive cell to begin with, or natural selection won’t work!   But they don’t want to deal with that.   This is Richard Dawkins pet phrase:   “We’re working on that.”   We’ll find it one day, “we’re working on it.”   No, they don’t.