LOUISVILLE, Ky. (BP)--Intelligent design has generated controversy because it deals with issues at the core of the current debate between secularists and people with a Christian worldview, said William Dembski, one of the ID movement's leading thinkers.

"These issues of intelligent design and creation really cut to the heart of worldviews, what we are about, how we're putting life together and what's ultimately meaningful, what morality is based on," Dembski said in speaking on "Darwinism and the Church: a Conversation on Design and Cultural Engagement" at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

It ends with a mission statement:

"I like to get back to the axioms, to the basics. If you can get at the taproot, at the thing that's really fundamental, then I think all these superstructures, the whole house of cards will come down," Dembski said. "Intelligent design is pressing that you can't get [the design of the universe] without intelligence."

Only the biblicists insist the universe shows any signs it had been designed. These are the same kind of people who saw evil spirits in clouds and smoke from volcanoes, just knew that earthquakes were intelligent beings shaking the ground to get our attention, and that lightning and thunder resulted from evil wars by these same beings.

To the rest of it, if it were engineered, the designer needs to go back to school and learn her trade. Were Mister Dembski to be an honest person, he would have said that Intelligent Design has generated controversy because that was its intent from the outset. He would have acknowledged the large portion of Christians who wholeheartedly accept Evolution as factual and true and as not "against" Christian beliefs. He could not acknowledge them and have his controversy too, and so he chooses to sling mud at science to cast doubt by aspersions, and abandon the wiser and more knowledgeable and intelligent members of his own flock.

By tying "meaning and morality" to evolution, Dembski discloses something he wants to keep hidden, that Intelligent Design is a religious creed (NOT scientific theory), and that it is not the creed all Xians espouse. The Intelligent Designer is none other than God, of course, barring some ID person supplying another name for it. The question most pressingly avoided is, "Who designed the Intelligent Designer?" Why avoid that question, in particular? Is it not obvious?– the next question will be, "Who designed that Intelligent Designer?" At some point, Intelligent Designer or none, something had to have come about for no decipherable reason; the reason for being undecipherable being that we were not there to observe it, and we have nothing in our present data with which to compare that initiative event.

In the final paragraph, Dembski's Orwellian reference to evolution as a "house of cards" disavows the credibility and success of science altogether and supports the religious notion that science is 'a bunch of heretics out to get God's people'. It offers wholehearted support to the ideal that Christians who understand evolution and regard it as true are, themselves, equally heretics with the atheists; and that the scientists who also adhere to Christian doctrine are among those who are claimed to be on the attack against Christianity. The attacks against science and secularism remind me of a bunch of fundies pitching rocks at atheists. When the atheists duck for cover, the fundies shout to each other, "Look! That means they're going on the attack. Ooh, we're such victims." Yeah, like lions, tigers and sharks are victims. It is a view that turns the truth around to view defensiveness as being activism.

And yet, there may some piddling intelligence behind the design. The intelligence is from those who look at results from billions of years of chaos, see a pattern left behind, and cogitate a designer. As I see it, the only Intelligence in the design of the Universe results from our unique way of seeing the results of chaos and, having never been there to observe the chaos itself, will look at splatter marks and swoon at the beautiful perception of perfection and 'design'. "Look at the amazing pattern. See how it uniformly radiates from a central location. The material was obviously liquefied when it was painted into place like that, and with so many other places that duplicate that design it had to have been done by a supernatural intelligence with supreme powers. Look at all these other things: Cows all look like cows, so they must have been designed that way, which then has to also be true of people, goats, donkeys and germs. To think anything else about it is to claim it happened by accident. We all know that cannot be true!"

Right!

What if I claim it happened not by preconceived design, not by accident, but only because it had to. It happened because it could. It happened because of a process most likely duplicated all over this vast universe. The name of that process is Evolution, and its effects can be found in every aspect of existence, not just in biology. Biology is just a relatively recent stage of advancement.