Yesterday, Discovery Institute and the Center for Science and Culture had our annual Christmas lunch at Ivar’s on the Seattle waterfront. As Stephen Meyer, John West, Steve Buri, and others got up and spoke, there was an odd shaking in the floor and windows that at first, with some alarm, I mistook for an earthquake. Except it went on too long for that. Probably it was something to do with pumps or other machinery working overtime because of the local historic floods that you may have heard about.
I mention the shaking because it struck me as a metaphor for the impact that my colleagues and their work have. Intelligent design shakes the culture, as you can see from some of the seemingly unlikely, high-profile people we, and the general thesis of design in nature, have persuaded recently. There was Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger and influential social scientist Charles Murray, both ex-agnostics. And now Elon Musk declares, “God is the Creator…. I believe this universe came from something. People have different labels.” It would be interesting to know how aware Musk, who follows physics, may be of the specifics of intelligent design evidence. The future will tell.
At our lunch, Dr. Meyer was gracious in acknowledging that ID — the research and writing itself, the dissemination to millions of people through books and social media — is very much a group endeavor. For example, consider Charles Murray in his new book Taking Religion Seriously who cites Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis repeatedly as an influence on him.
After a long quote from Meyer’s book, Murray says, “The fantastic brute fact of the Big Bang forced me to rethink everything.” He writes, “the reality of a beginning to the universe had momentous implications for the existence of the entity I might as well call God.” He again recommends Return of the God Hypothesis, commenting that “You have a choice of books that discuss evidence for the anthropic principle as it relates to religion.”
On the precision of the cosmic fine-tuning, he quotes Meyer who says, “I’m not aware of a word in English that does justice to the kind of precision we are discussing.” In his acknowledgment to us all, gathered together yesterday, Dr. Meyer was saying that a book like Murray’s was influenced not by Steve Meyer’s work alone but by the labor of many people that pours (you might say floods) through his and other ID scholars’ presentations of the scientific evidence.
Yesterday we learned from Casey Luskin of more exciting and important research in the pipeline by our scientists that will see publication in a very prestigious non-ID peer-reviewed publication. More on that is upcoming. It’s all part of the group effort. The photo you see above is just those of us in Seattle. The Center for Science and Culture extends through a number of other states.
Remember that every time we win over someone like Sanger or Murray, someone with a big megaphone, they go on to persuade many other people whose names you and I will never know. This is the flood and it’s the earthquake.
We are changing many, many lives. I want to ask you directly then to help us reach even more in the coming year. All of this requires the contributions of our friends, like you, who are as important in our work as any scientist, scholar, or writer. Please consider adding yourself today, your voice and your heart, to our efforts with a gift of any size.