Precisely Because Intelligent Design Does Not Turn

You Have To Understand, In The Current Academic Climate, Intelligent Design Is Like Leprosy Or Heresy In Times Past. To Be Tagged As An Id Supporter Is To Become An Academic Pariah, And This Holds Even At So-called Christian Institutions That Place A Premium On Respectability At The Expense Of Truth And The Offense Of The Gospel.

Naturalism Is The View That The Physical World Is A Self-contained System That Works By Blind, Unbroken Natural Laws. Naturalism Doesn't Come Right Out And Say There's Nothing Beyond Nature. Rather, It Says That Nothing Beyond Nature Could Have Any Conceivable Relevance To What Happens In Nature. Naturalism's Answer To Theism Is Not Atheism But Benign Neglect. People Are Welcome To Believe In God, Though Not A God Who Makes A Difference In The Natural Order.

Because We Don't See The Evil Destroyed Now And Thus Experience The Suffering That Evil Inevitably Inflicts, We Are Tempted To Doubt God's Existence And Goodness.

Scientists Rightly Resist Invoking The Supernatural In Scientific Explanations For Fear Of Committing A God-of-the-gaps Fallacy (the Fallacy Of Using God As A Stop-gap For Ignorance). Yet Without Some Restriction On The Use Of Chance, Scientists Are In Danger Of Committing A Logically Equivalent Fallacy-one We May Call The “chance-of-the-gaps Fallacy.” Chance, Like God, Can Become A Stop-gap For Ignorance.

Constrained Optimization Is The Art Of Compromise Between Conflicting Objectives. This Is What Design Is All About. To Find Fault With Biological Design - As Stephen Jay Gould Regularly Does - Because It Misses Some Idealized Optimum Is Therefore Gratuitous. Not Knowing The Objectives Of The Designer, Gould Is In No Position To Say Whether The Designer Has Proposed A Faulty Compromise Among Those Objectives.