What Went Wrong?

I believe that at some time well before 2059, the bicentennial year of Darwin's Origin of the Species, perhaps as early as 2009 or 2019, there will be another celebration that will mark the demise of the Darwinist ideology that was so triumphant in 1959. The theme of this anti centennial will be "What Went Wrong?" or perhaps, "How Could We Ever Have Let It Happen?" 

What went wrong is that scientists committed the original sin, which in science means believing what you want to believe instead of what your experiments and observations show you. In small matters you cannot afford as a scientist to indulge in the original sin because your colleagues will show you up and make a fool out of you. If, however, you are leading the whole research community in a direction it wants to go, your colleagues might lack the motivation or might even be afraid to challenge you. 

What happened in that great triumphal celebration of 1959 is that science embraced a religious dogma called naturalism or materialism. Science declared that nature is all there is and that matter created everything that exists. The scientific community had a common interest in believing this creed because it affirmed that in principle there is nothing beyond the understanding and control of science. What went wrong in the wake of the Darwinian triumph was that the authority of science was captured by an ideology, and the evolutionary scientists thereafter believed what they wanted to believe rather than what the fossil data, the genetic data, the embryological data and the molecular data were showing them. 

What are we going to do to correct this deplorable situation? Most of us who attended this conference are in academic life, and we will be doing the academic job of research, writing and teaching. We have launched a new journal, Origins & Design, and we have had a very successful first conference at Biola. Many more people have attended than we originally expected, and a lot of very able people are now making a contribution in the area of intelligent design. We hope to schedule future conferences at major secular universities. We are developing a research agenda. We have confidence in our intellectual position. We are observing that the materialists have to rely on distortion and appeals to prejudice to defend their position. This is a sign that we have taken the high intellectual ground. 

We also have our healthy disagreements about all sorts of specifics. But we are united on a common approach, a shared determination to define the issues correctly. It is an approach that everyone can contribute to-not just people with academic positions but also schoolteachers, parents, youth workers and everyone who has some influence over the education of the next generation of thinkers.