(1) Mike Miner says “intelligent design calls itself a scientific theory, but it can’t be tested” [Hot Type, September 9]. But neither can evolution. When’s the last time you heard of a scientist evolving a chimp to a man? Got you there, Mike. In fact, you might as well throw out the big bang theory on the same grounds.
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Do I believe in ID? Nah. Am I creationist? Nah, that’s a bunch of silly junk. You can only believe God wrote the Bible if you think God doesn’t know what the facts are, because the Bible is full of contradictions. There’s two different stories of Genesis, two different stories of the Flood (in one, the animals go in by sevens, in the other by twos). And even evangelical fundamentalists don’t believe that the stars cause rain, the circumference of a circle is 3x its diameter, the earth is flat, or the sun goes around the earth (all in the Bible).
I personally believe that the evolutionists have been looking through the wrong end of the telescope–that is, their focus has been entirely on exterior appearance. Darwin knew nothing of electron microscopy, nor did it exist in his time. By the principle of Occam’s razor, the simplest explanation for the fact that species appear to change on a dime, not gradually, is that the need for change is feedbacked to the cell. And then species change from the inside out, instantly. That would explain the deficiencies in the fossil record. But who or what wants them to change, that’s the interesting question. I have my own idea about this, but it’s kind of crackpot and I don’t think anyone would be interested. In any case, there’s no reason ID and evolution can’t exist together. Evolution is a means of explaining species change on our planet from bacteria to man–and Darwin never used it to explain anything else–but there’s a lot more to the universe than earth.