Mohler Speaks for Intelligent Design on MSNBC
Question of scientific and theistic validation of truth remains at the heart of man’s search of origin
Following the Dover area school district’s decision on October 18th to make alternative theories to evolution available to students, advocates for the inclusion of intelligent design, and arguments against the incorporation of such into the public school system have restlessly battled to protect the Biblical teachings and the truthful deliverance of education.
On December 14, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed suit against a school board in Dover County, Pennsylvania for its decision to include Intelligent Design, a theory which ascribes the origin of life to the works of God or a superintelligent being, alongside the theory of evolution.
According to the Baptist Press, Reverend Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary told the viewers of MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country,” that the theory of evolution has become an “intellectual pacifier” for the secular left in America.
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Mohler commented, " The American public has seen through the theories -- that's right, there are multiple theories, there's not just one theory of evolution -- and I think America's parents are waking up and they are not going to rest until the schools do the right thing."
David Silverman, communications director for American Atheists, CCM artist Natalie Grant, and Republican strategist Jack Burkman appeared as guests alongside Mohler during the commentary, which was hosted by Pat Buchanan.
Silverman argued that only Darwinian evolution theory can be substantiated by scientific fact and should be taught solely in public schools.
"The idea that Darwinistic evolution has happened is fact," Silverman said. "The idea that the universe was created by an invisible magic man in the sky is fiction. It is mythology and it should not be taught. There is no way around it."
Mohler, a Christian theologian and an opinion-leader of the largest Christian denomination in the US, asserted that evolution alone is inadequate and must be complemented with Intelligent Design.
"But the theory of Intelligent Design comes down to this: in the entire complexity of the universe as we know it -- from something as complex as the human eye to the glory of the sky, all the cosmos, all of the planets and their proportion -- there is more information necessary there than the theory of evolution can explain,” reported the BP.
"According to even evolutionary theory, the information has to be there. That theory can't account for how the information gets there ahead of the mutation or the change."
Grant, a mother and also a Christian, stated that the vast majority of Americans are Christians and they many parents wish for their children to receive a well-balanced education, which presents both Intelligent Design and Darwinian evolution theory.
"If my child has to sit in the classroom and be taught [evolution] as an option that is held in the world, why is it that my child cannot also sit in the classroom and be taught about Intelligent Design as a theory, as an option, so that a child can have a balanced education?”
Convergence of Theology and Science
Prior to the on-going struggle to dominate the American public education with different forms of theories regarding the origin of humanity, in 1981 the National Academy of Sciences declared, "Religion and science are separate and mutually exclusive realms of human thought."
National Academy of Sciences, one of the most prestigious organizations that consists of prominent scientists of America today, signaled a possible shift in the paradigm of conflicting perspectives of two independent disciplines of knowledge.
The academy’s declaration, which compartmentalizes assertions from both religious and Darwinian advocates into a mutually separate setting, has recently emerged with a common ground on which notable scientists are seeing opportunities to reconcile a long-existed rupture.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science now sponsors a "Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion." Science luminaries who in the '70s shrugged at faith as pseudo-science — including E. O. Wilson and the late Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan — have endorsed some form of reconciliatory convergence between science and religion.
Scientific thought of the 20th century in its earlier stages have embraced the pure materialistic view everything has a natural explanation has begun to gradually evolve to reconsider the notion that there is more to existence than what meets the eye in a new light of interests.
John Pokinghorne, a renown physicist and a Canon Theologian at England’s Liverpool Cathedral in heart asserted the following statement on the home page of National Secular Society, a UK organization founded in 1866 by Charles Bradlaugh:
“We should take science seriously but recognise that is has purchased its great success by the modesty of its ambition. An honest science does not claim to ask and answer every question. It limits itself to issues of process, the way in which things happen. Questions of meaning and purpose are set aside, though they too are meaningful and necessary to ask. A scientist, as a scientist, can only describe music as neural response to vibrations in the air. The mystery of music slips through the wider meshes of the scientific net.
An honest science recognises that its investigations centre on a limited kind of experience, the impersonal and so repeatable. This gives science the great weapon of experiment, but not all experience can be treated in this way. Personal encounter, the most significant aspect of human life, is intrinsically unique. We never hear a Beethoven quartet the same way twice, even if we play the same disc.
Everyone needs a wider world-view than science alone can give us - a move from physics to metaphysics. Even those who proclaim the self-sufficiency of science are making a metaphysical assertion, certainly going beyond science itself. A religious view is an alternative metaphysical position, based not on the 'brute fact' of the material world but on the 'brute fact' of the will of the divine Agent. Two brief points may be made about theistic belief.
The coming to be of persons seems to many to be the most significant event in cosmic history that we know about. The universe became aware of itself, and science became a possibility. This suggests to many that a personal God is a better foundation for understanding than impersonal nature.
Second, the fundamental religious question is the question of truth. Believers are not called to intellectual suicide through assent to an unquestionable authority, but they are called to seek motivated belief. What those motivations might be is a complex question that cannot be summarised in a paragraph, but they certainly exist and are worthy of serious intellectual consideration."
