 Intelligent Design Proponents Poke Holes in Darwinism
From amino acids to whale teeth and everything in between, intelligent design theorists argued at the University of San Francisco Sept. 27-28 that evolutionary theory can not entirely account for how all the characteristics of life came into being.
Billed as the first of its kind in the Bay Area, the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Conference attracted approximately 170 people interested in the possibilities of an intelligent agent at work in the design of the universe and all its inhabitants. The conference was organized by Stephen Huxley, a professor in the School of Business and Management, who last spring received a Jesuit Foundation grant to fund the project.
“I wanted to bring it to USF because it was a significant topic,” Huxley said. “All our speakers were Ph.Ds and scientists and USF is the place where ideas are put forth. We’re supposed to be a font of ideas here.”
The conference attracted at least six outspoken Darwinists from the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, which bills itself as “working to defend the teaching of evolution against sectarian attack.” The Darwinists challenged speakers’ theories during question and answer periods.
“While many people who claim Darwinian theory explains the complexity of life, they do not recognize their claims are weak or weaker than other explanations,” said speaker Michael Behe, a research biochemist and author of Darwin’s Black Box which criticizes the theory of evolution.
Behe and the eight other speakers at the conference, including Paul Chien, a professor of biology at USF, were careful not to explicitly say God created the universe, which differentiates intelligent design from creationism. Rather, the conference attempted to poke holes in Darwin’s theory.
“Experiential evidence suggests small-scale evolution is limited, it cannot be extrapolated to the massive changes evolution requires,” said Cornelius Hunter, author of Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil. “Science must always be tentative. To say ‘only evolution would explain this’ is not science.”
Like Hunter, Chien interpreted evidence of the fossil record as proof of purposeful design. Recent evidence points to a “biological big bang” when a variety of isolated animals appeared millions of years ago during the Cambrian period, without any traces of ancestry, Chien said. In other explorations of the same theme, origin of life expert Edward Peltzer refuted the idea of life beginning in a warm, evolutionary “soup” where chemical processes first formed simple cells. Instead, he said, chemical processes necessary for life could not take place without the cell organism in place from the start.
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