The Washington Post printed Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman’s short op-ed in today’s “Free For All” section of the Post.
Blind Eye Toward Intelligent Design
There really is a scientific case against Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and another for the alternative of intelligent design, but you will not find them in The Post. Instead, we have Peter Slevin [“Evolution’s Grass-Roots Defender Grows in Va.,” Metro, July 20] regaling us about a group of underemployed 1960s activists who were looking for a cause and picked the defense of Darwin’s theory. On June 3 a Post editorial derided “The Privileged Planet,” a film about cosmology, as “religious” — an untrue description that nonetheless has the apparent merit of ending discussion on any number of questions these days.
Darwin apologists are happy to opine on religion and politics, of course. What they will not do is address the growing evidence against Darwin’s theory. More than 400 brave scientists now question that theory publicly. Whether to teach the evidence both for and against Darwin’s theory is the only question before most school boards — not intelligent design.
Intelligent design is another matter, and it is almost always misrepresented in the media. Simply put, intelligent-design theorists contend that scientists have uncovered demonstrable indicators of design in nature. The theory holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. It goes no further. It is not creationism. It is not religion.
The only religious believers in all this are the Darwinists who refuse to air the strengths and weaknesses of Darwin’s theory and who seek to punish the scholars and teachers who do.
— Bruce Chapman