Intelligent Design maybe science after all...and science may not be....

Many intellectuals say that Intelligent Design isn't science, because you start with the presupposition that God or something created the universe. That's not true. It follows the evidence wherever it leads. Do you rule out at the outset the possibilities of a creator, and then only look at evidence that tries to create a naturalistic explanation for the data? Or, are you open to the possibility of an intelligent designer? Obviously, science must be open to all possibilities. The worlds greatest philosophical atheist Tony Flew, turned away from atheism as he ...'had to follow the evidence." I think if you do look at cosmology and physics and biochemistry and genetics and consciousness and astronomy, the arrows point in a direction and I think that direction is toward an intelligent designer. To me, cosmology and physics are two of the most powerful areas that point toward a creator. The evidence over the last 50 years that points toward the beginning of a universe allows an old Muslim argument to kick into gear, which says that whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist; therefore the universe has a cause. We have scientific data that indicates the universe did have a beginning, and so that argument takes on new meaning. Couple that with the fine-tuning of the universe, the dozens of parameters of physics that are so tuned to allow life to exist. Just those two areas of science point powerfully toward the existence of a creator who's beyond time and space, who's immaterial, who's powerful, who's smart. You talked to a lot of scientists, many of them atheists, who studied the facts and came to conclusions other than the standard evolutionary explanation for life. Exactly right. If astronomy and physics and biochemistry suggest an Intelligent Designer, should we not have the freedom to consider that as a possibility? Linus Pauling, who won the Nobel Prize twice, said science ought to be the search for truth. Let's not limit our search to only a naturalistic explanation. Let's leave open the possibility that we may not know everything about the universe. There may be a dimension that we don't quite comprehend. If the evidence points in that direction, let's pursue it. It didn't seem hard to find top quality scientists and researchers who came to that conclusion. Absolutely. My problem was trying to pare it down to who I thought would be someone who would be able to articulate the evidence powerfully and persuasively and in a way that everybody could get. There's more than 300 scientists with doctorates from major universities who are skeptical of the claims of neo-Darwinism. You write about being taught as a student evidence for evolution that actually wasn't true. Can you talk about some of those myths that are often taught? If you define evolution as change over time, everybody agrees there's been evolution. The question is, what about the grandest claims of neo-Darwinism, that a common ancestor and natural selection acting on random variation over eons of time can account for all this diversity of life? Those grandest claims don't withstand scrutiny. We look at the Cambrian explosion, the sudden appearance of virtually all of the phyla of the animal kingdom with no predecessors. That flies in the face of neo-Darwinism. I'm not saying that Intelligent Design ought to be taught in public schools. I am saying that kids ought to be open to possibilities and pursue the evidence wherever it points, including in that direction. When journalists cover the teaching of Intelligent Design in public schools, they do a quick summary of Intelligent Design by saying it's the idea that life is so complex it must have had some sort of designer. Does that do justice to the theory? It really doesn't, because mere complexity is not the issue. There are complex things that don't point toward Intelligent Design, things like salt crystals. What that leaves out is the cosmological evidence for a beginning of the universe that begs the existence of a creator. It leaves out the fine-tuning of the universe, which looks at the way in which the universe is finely tuned to allow for life. It leaves out the biological information segment. It isn't just that life is complex; it is that life has information. It's not just raw complexity. It's a message that we find in biological information such as DNA. If you walk down the beach and you see ripples in the sand, it's logical to say that's a complex arrangement of the sand that the waves produced. But if you walk down the beach and you see "John Loves Mary" and a big heart around it and an arrow through it, you wouldn't think the waves produced it. It's information with content. The biological information of a living organism is biological information. Nature can't produce that. It takes intelligence to produce information. Whenever we see a novel or a cave painting or data on a computer, we know there's an intelligence behind it. When we look at the four-letter chemical alphabet of DNA and how it spells out the precise assembly instructions for every protein out of which our body is built, to me that points in the direction of an intelligence behind it. It isn't just complexity. How can Intelligent Design get past the creationist label? It's always the Darwinists who bring that up. The Intelligent Design person brings up scientific data and arguments based on scientific evidence to support his or her beliefs. And then it goes to the other side, and that person is immediately accused of injecting faith and injecting religion and trying to be a subterfuge to teach the Bible in schools. Well, time out here, who's bringing up religion? I didn't hear the Intelligent Design advocate bring up religion. It's being brought up by the other side. It's an ad hominem argument that Darwinists use to throw sand in people's eyes to suggest that this is just biblical creationism in another disguise. What I'd like to see is the debate centered on the evidence and the data. Why are people so afraid of evidence that happens to point toward an affirmation of what the vast majority of people on the Earth believe in the first place?