I have written a “Theological Supplement” to my new Discovery Institute Press book “In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design, 2nd edition.” It is theological, not scientific, so it is not part of the new book, and some may feel I should not even be introducing it here at UD. But here is how I introduced the supplement in my new book (in Section 9.4) and explained why I felt the supplementary essays were relevant to the topic of ID, even though they are explicitly (non-fundamentalist) Christian essays.
I would especially like to encourage some of our angry ID critics here to take a look. You may be surprised to find you like it more than you expected; at least that is what I hope. I have nevertheless turned off comments: if you don’t like the new chapters, just ignore them, I don’t claim to have any scientific evidence to support these theological conclusions.
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It is widely believed that Darwinism is based on good science, and that those who oppose it simply do not like its philosophical and religious implications. The truth is exactly the opposite. In a June 15, 2012 post at www.evolutionnews.org, Max Planck Institute biologist W.E. Loennig said “Normally the better your arguments are, the more people open their minds to your theory, but with ID, the better your arguments are, the more they close their minds, and the angrier they become. This is science upside down.” The case for Darwinism is weaker every day, and yet Darwinist rhetoric only becomes stronger and angrier; clearly this theory draws its power not so much from scientific evidence as from philosophical and religious convictions. If you really examine the reasons scientists support Darwinism, I believe you will find in most cases that they are philosophical and theological. For example, Darwin wrote [Barlow 1958], “I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.” Darwin is apparently referring to passages like John 3:18, “He who does not believe is condemned,” which are sometimes interpreted to mean that all non-Christians are “condemned.” If I thought the Christian God were that unfair, I would share Darwin’s view of Christianity, and I might also prefer to believe we were accidents of Nature. But that John did not mean this as a condemnation of all non-Christians is clear from the following verse: “… and this is the condemnation, that light has come into the world, and men preferred the darkness, because their deeds were evil.”
Because it has become obvious to me through the years that support for Darwinism in the scientific world is primarily based not on good science but on the philosophical and theological problems scientists have with what they see as the alternative, I have attempted to deal with some of these difficult problems in a “Theological Supplement” to this book, which can be found here:
www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/sewell/part2.html
Including all of these theological chapters in a book on intelligent design would not be appropriate, as it would only encourage those who claim that ID proponents do not understand the difference between science and religion. Most of us do understand the difference, we are just interested in both, and so are our critics.
I am nevertheless including one of these chapters here, as an “Epilogue” to set it off from the scientific chapters, because it deals with what I believe is by far the most powerful of all the philosophical and theological objections to ID, the problem of pain.