Sticker Wars

Sticker Wars: Intelligent design foes fight evolution sticker
CHARLES COLSON
BreakPoint
Published January 27, 2005

Last week a federal judge, egged on by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), ordered a Georgia school district to remove stickers from biology textbooks. Why? Because, according to the judge, a simple statement written on the stickers 'that evolution is a theory, not a fact' was an unconstitutional endorsement of religion. He held evolution as fact!

This is just the latest example of a plague of intellectual blindness among our secular elites.

In Georgia's Cobb County, school officials added the stickers two years ago onto the textbooks which presented evolution as an established fact, ignoring competing ideas about life's origins. Now, this is not just another burst of Christian-bashing. What this ruling really represents is a blindness to reality—a mindset rampant within our culture.

According to this mindset, any challenge to Darwinism is by definition religious. Now, imagine applying this logic to any other area. Suppose your state passed a law against murder, and the ACLU went to court, claiming it was an endorsement of religion. After all, the Ten Commandments prohibit murder! Or imagine someone suing a town over its zoning laws. The Bible tells us to put a fence on our roof so that no one will fall off. Are building codes, therefore, religious? If the courts approached conflicts over other laws the way they do over biology, we'd soon have no laws left at all—except maybe pooper-scooper laws, because I don't think the Bible says anything about that.

The constitutional argument is phony. Honest observers quickly realize that the debate here over life's origins is not one of science versus religion, but of science versus science. Take the work of biochemist Michael Behe, a professor at Lehigh University. Initially, Behe accepted Darwinist teachings. But then he began reading articles questioning evolutionary theories. He found the arguments compelling. So he began to do research of his own.

In his book published 10 years ago, Darwin's Black Box, he introduced a concept he calls "irreducible complexity." He argues that complex structures like proteins cannot be assembled piecemeal, with gradual improvement of function. Instead, like a mousetrap, all the parts—catch, spring, hammer, and so forth—must be assembled simultaneously, or the protein doesn't work.

Soon after the book was published, its thesis was challenged by the leading expert in America on cell structure, Dr. Russell Doolittle at the University of California. He cited a scientific study supposedly disproving irreducible complexity. Behe immediately researched it and found it proved just the opposite: It confirmed him. So Behe went back to Dolittle. In a phone conversation, Doolittle admitted he was wrong, but he has never made a public retraction.

This is the strategy of Darwinists: to simply deny what they know to be true. Look, nobody was around at the time of the creation with a video camera. Naturalism requires at least as much faith as intelligent design. And then science has to be objectively examined, but Darwinists won't do this. So, when judges rule scientific ideas out of bounds, well, it's time to expose all of this for what it is: know-nothingness of the worst kind, willful blindness.

Don't you be taken in. Keep demanding the truth, and in time, we're going to win an honest debate.

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