Intelligent Design: What About HONESTY?

I've been taking a look at Intelligent Design the last few days. As I've had a few minutes here and there, I've also been watching the movie Expelled, which is a defense of Intelligent Design, bit by bit.

All I can say is: Wow!

Caroline Crocker: Story Doesn't Hold Up

I'm looking right now at a Washington Post article from February 5, 2006. It describes a November 2, 2005 class that Caroline Crocker conducted at Northern Virginia Community College.

According to Expelled Caroline Crocker was blacklisted for just mentioning Intelligent Design. As she puts it in the movie, she only used the word once or twice. As a result, she says in the movie, no one will hire her.

The Washington Post article gives a much different picture. Here is a professor taking sweeping shots at Darwinism with incredible sloppiness.

She says, for example, that in Bernard Kettlewell's famous peppered moth study. According to the Washington Post, she told her students that the study was falsified. She said he glued the moths to the trees in the study.

He didn't. That story got around because it's common for photographers to glue dead moths to trees to get pictures for a story.

I read that refutation of Caroline Crocker's slander (delivered as instruction in a Biology 101 college class) on Wikipedia and several other sites, but here's an anti-Darwinism site that points out the actual facts as well: "Most textbook photos are of dead moths glued to tree trunks."

That site complains about Kettlewell's study as well, but it does not pass on slander, as Caroline Crocker did.

There's Lots More

I devoted some paragraphs to just that one point so this post wouldn't be too long. However, in passing, here's some others.

• She blames science and evolution for Nazi Germany.


• She claims, "I've heard scientists say people won't understand, so they should only be told one side."


• She "believes that biological systems cannot grow more complex on their own any more than a novel, through chance typographical errors, can turn into a different book, with a different story. How could anyone think that new books get written because of typos in old books?"

A quick answer to those: Even if Nazis used science to justify their actions, that doesn't make the science false. Scientists are happy to discuss the evidence for both sides. It can be found anywhere. And finally, the book metaphor is irrelevant. Biological systems can grow more complex, and it's easy to explain.

Intelligent Design and Honesty: The Point

The point I'm trying to make is that there's nothing honest about Expelled. Caroline Crocker did not just mention Intelligent Design; she was crusading against Darwinism, and she was doing it unprofessionally and inaccurately.

Despite her claims in the movie, Pamela Winnick was not "finished as a journalist" after crusading for, not just mentioning, Intelligent Design.

In the movie, Ben Stein interviews a Professor Giertych, a population geneticist, who says that Darwin thought natural selection could produce new information. Nonsense. Any first year Biology student knows that mutation produces new information, and natural selection sorts it.

Worse, Ben Stein interviews multiple people who say that Intelligent Design is not opposed to evolution per se. What he doesn't do is tell us when he's interviewing a Christian, young-earth creationist like Professor Giertych, who does oppose evolution.

Honesty and Dishonesty

We are never going to "prove God" through science by being liars for Jesus. We have a much better chance of displaying God to the world by being honest people, as Jesus commands us to be.

Liars have their part in the lake of fire, so if you're going to try to prove that there's a Creator, and you suspect that Creator is Jesus Christ, it might me good to avoid lying, don't you think?