What Lutherans Believe

Make Room for Intelligent Design

The creation vs. evolution debate is no longer a matter of science vs. religion. It's one kind of science vs. another, and the public schools of America ought to teach both.

A Statement by Dr. A. L. Barry President of The Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod

ST. LOUIS, September 6, 2000--Not since the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925 has the creation vs. evolution debate run so hot. The controversy, particularly as it relates to what Americašs public-school children are taught in their science classrooms, boiled up in Kansas in recent months and is a simmering issue in some 14 others states as well.

The reason for all the heat can be summed up in two words: Intelligent Design, the idea that the ordered universe and the incredible complexities of life on earth could not have resulted from chance but rather must have required an intelligent creator.

Proponents of Intelligent Design have made great headway in recent years, particularly in studies relating to genetics, mutations and the principle known as "irreducible complexity."These findings have added muscle to the long-held creationist arguments on the laws of thermodynamics, the dubious dating-methods used by evolutionists, and the fossil record, the latter still showing no conclusive transitional stages in types or kinds (one would think every fossil would show a transitional stage). Together, these evidences, along with many others, form a convincing case--a convincing scientific case--for the Creation Model.

Unfortunately, evolutionists appear unwilling to address these findings. They are quick to say they are defending science, yet when confronted by an Intelligent Design paradigm that explains the data better than their own (such as on the human eye, a birdšs wing or the processes of blood-clotting), they offer no scientific defense at all. Instead, they lash out, ridiculing the Intelligent Design paradigm as nothing more than "religious."

If evolutionary theory were so plainly and demonstrably true, the case for it, after a century-and-a-half of systematic public indoctrination, should well-nigh be proved by now, no further questions. But instead, if anything, Darwin is on the run. A 1999 Gallup poll found that nearly 70 percent of American adults favored teaching both creation and evolution in public schools.

While the evolution lobby would have the public think otherwise, those in favor of teaching creation alongside evolution cannot be conveniently stereotyped as backward, ignorant, Flat Earth fanatics. To the contrary, believers in special creation are discerning, rationale people--tens of millions of them--who, upon weighing the evidence, have dismissed evolutionary theory as untenable. And these millions are being joined by growing numbers of biologists, geologists, paleontologists, physicists, medical doctors, mathematicians and other professionals in the pure and applied sciences.

The creation vs. evolution debate is no longer a matter of science vs. religion. It is naturalistic science ("naturalism" recognizing only the natural or material world as "real") vs. creationist science. Contrary to the myth employed by strident evolutionists, creationists, including the religious ones, have no interest in making the Genesis account of lifešs origins the exclusive curriculum of public-school science students. What Bible-believing parent, after all, would want his child taught Genesis by a scoffing, non-believing teacher who resented his task?

What creationists want is simply this: equal time for what they consider a legitimate alternative--Intelligent Design. As much compelling evidence as there is for a young earth and a worldwide hydraulic cataclysm (the Noahic Flood, which explains much about our planet's geology and paleontology), Intelligent Design, on its own merits, can be argued effectively without a single reference to the Scriptures.

If evolutionists persist in saying that creation cannot be divorced from religion, then they themselves must be prepared to admit that their orthodoxy--that life in all its beauty, organization and complexity arose from random mutations and other Darwinian speculations--is just as dogmatic, just as much a religion, really, as what they scorn. If creation is theistic, calling for an intelligent, purposeful Author of Life, then naturalistic evolution is atheistic, denying the existence of that Author and any supernatural acts wrought by His hand. Though polemical to each other, creation and evolution, being empirically unobservable, untestable and unprovable world-views, are in the end both based on belief, on faith.

Thus, neither creation nor evolution can properly serve as the sole syllabus of public school science classes on origins. One is fine for private religious schools, the other for private humanistic schools. But neither, by itself, can suffice in public schools.

Yet, for generations, evolution, with all its weaknesses and unexplained gaps, has reigned unchallenged in American public education (to say nothing of our zoos, science centers, natural-history museums and mass media). Only now, finally, is evolution being contested on its own terms: objective science.

The data and evidence for scientific creation--strictly independent of God's Word in Genesis--have grown too substantial to be ignored any longer. On the blackboards of America's public-school science classrooms, the time has come for the words "evolution," "naturalism," and "neo-Darwinism" to make room for "Intelligent Design." Anything less, based on the evidence, would be intellectually dishonest.

The Rev. Dr. A.L. Barry

President The Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod

September 6, 2000