This morning’s Dallas Morning News features a bold op-ed by Bruce Chapman and John West calling for critics at SMU to employ the method of Charles Darwin himself: engage in the discussion.
The article, “Are the Darwinists afraid to debate us,” is a response to the SMU science professors who called on their university to ban the conference from campus.
Rather than “ludicrously comparing ID proponents to faith healers or even Holocaust-deniers,” as one columnist did last week, Chapman and West suggest that critics of intelligent design “engage ID scholars in a serious discussion.” They pointedly ask, “what is so frightening about allowing it [the evidence for design] to be heard at SMU?”
While critics at SMU declined to engage in a dialogue with ID scholars at the Darwin vs. Design conference this weekend, Chapman and West are not surprised:
Unfortunately, this behavior is all too common among defenders of evolutionary theory. They publicly disparage intelligent design (often showing through their comments that they know very little about what it actually proposes), but they refuse to engage in genuine dialogue.
What a different approach from that modeled by Darwin himself, who humbly and patiently responded to objections to his theory and who frankly acknowledged that “a fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.”
What are today’s Darwinists so afraid of?
It’s a question that more people at SMU might want to consider.