I regularly visit scienceblogs.com, and there I sometimes have occasion to witness battles between intelligent design apologists and evolutionary scientists and science writers. I feel sort of sorry for the I.D. folks, because they always lose. On the other hand, I sort of don’t feel sorry for them because they make a lot of enemies unnecessarily and confirm people’s prejudices about religious folk.

I myself am a creationist, in the sense that I believe God makes all the stuff. On the other hand, I don’t see much in the Bible explaining exactly how it all gets made, so I’m content to go with the mainstream scientific explanations on the nitty gritty. It doesn’t seem anathema to God’s character to work through processes of transformation and change. (If it is, boy, is my soul in trouble.)

So I wish the I.D. people would just change tactics. I sometimes get the feeling that they think scientists are obstinately clinging to evolution in a perverse desire to thwart their creator. I think scientists like evolution because it is an useful paradigm for both predicting outcomes and designing research projects that will produce interesting results. To compete with evolution, I.D. apologists will have to show that they have an alternate theory that is equally robust. My recommendation, O passionate Intelligent Design defenders? Go get your biology PhD’s and your research grants, formulate your theory, and test it as many ways as you can, publishing your results in peer-reviewed journals. You’re going to have a lot of work to do since people have been testing and refining evolution for about 100 years. But if the evidence is there, it’s there, and the truth will out.
Let’s say this is the theory: A supreme being or beings made all life on earth, and he/she/it/they made it in a specific period of time, and he/she/it/they got it right the first time.

Example interesting research project: Given: species go extinct. Given: All species were created at the same time. Therefore: the further you go back in the past, the more species diversity you should find. (the opposite of what evolution predicts) Ergo: Go to some fertile area, dig around, and compare evidence of species diversity from different eras. Make sure you proceed in a rigorous, repeatable, way, and that your results are verifiable.

Won’t that be so much better than arguing a lot?

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