Creationism and Intelligent Design: Scientific and Theological Difficulties

1. National Academy of Science, Institute of Medicine, Science, Evolution and Creationism (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2008), 12.

2. Frank Newport, “Third of Americans Say Evidence Has Supported Darwin’s Evolution Theory,” 2004, http://www.gallup.com/poll/14107/third-americans-say-evidence-has-supported-darwins-evolution-theory.aspx (accessed April 4, 2010).

3. Pew Forum Survey, “Public Divided on Origins of Life,” 2005, http://pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Public-Divided-on-Origins-of-Life.aspx (accessed April 4, 2010).

4. Ken Ham, “Couldn’t God Have Used Evolution?”, May 1, 2007, http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/couldnt-god-have-used-evolution (accessed April 4, 2010).

5. John G. West, “Is Darwinian Evolution Compatible with Religion?”, August 22, 2007, http://www.discovery.org/a/9721 (accessed April 4, 2010).

6. George McCready Price, The New Geology (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press, 1923); John C. Whitcomb Jr. and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications (1961; rpt., Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1998); Henry M. Morris, Scientific Creationism (1985; rpt., El Cajon, Calif.: Creation-Life Publishers, 2000); Duane T. Gish, Evolution: The Fossils Say No! (El Cajon, Calif.: Creation-Life Publishers, 1973); Duane T. Gish, Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record (El Cajon, Calif.: Creation-Life Publishers, 1985).

7. William J. Overton, McLean vs. Arkansas Board of Education, court decision, 529 Federal Supplement 1255 (Eastern District of Arkansas 1982), http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mclean-v-arkansas.html; Edward v. Aguillard, U.S. Supreme Court Decision No. 85-1513, June 19, 1987, http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/edwards-v-aguillard.html (both accessed April 4, 2010).

8. See http://www.creationmuseum.org and http://web.mit.edu/gjordan/www/creation/index.html (accessed April 4, 2010).

9. Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); William A. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998); William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1999); William A. Dembski, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, 2d ed. (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1993); Phillip E. Johnson, The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2000); Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2000).

10. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, Trial transcript: Day 6 (October 5), A.M. Session, Part 2, http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day6am2.html (accessed April 4, 2010).

11. Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross, Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 25-33.

12. Ariel Hart, “Judge in Georgia Orders Anti-Evolution Stickers Removed from Textbooks,” New York Times, January 14, 2005, A16, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/14/national/14sticker.html (accessed April 4, 2010).

13. Jodi Wilgoren, “Kansas Board Approves Challenges to Evolution,” New York Times, November 9, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/09/national/09kansas.html (April 4, 2010).

14. Laurie Lebo, The Devil in Dover: An Insider’s Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-town America (New York: New Press, 2008), 26-47, 108-76.

15. Judge John E. Jones, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, Memorandum Opinion, December 20, 2005, http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf (accessed April 4, 2010).

16. Alan Choate, “Evolution Bill Moves to Senate,” Daily Herald (Provo, Utah) January 17, 2006, http://www.heraldextra.com/news/article_f50c27bb-9b16-5ad1-aef7-d10404f23df9.html (accessed April 4, 2010).

17. William Evenson, “Evolution,” in The Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1992), 2:478. Serving in the First Presidency in 1931 were Heber J. Grant, Anthony W. Ivins, and Charles W. Nibley.

18. Daniel J. Fairbanks, Relics of Eden: The Powerful Evidence of Evolution in Human DNA (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2007); Trent D. Stephens and D. Jeffrey Meldrum, Evolution and Mormonism: A Quest for Understanding (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2001); Sterling B. Talmage, Can Science Be Faith Promoting?, edited by Stan Larson (Salt Lake City: Blue Ribbon Books, 2000).

19. William E. Evenson and Duane E. Jeffery, eds., Mormonism and Evolution: The Authoritative LDS Statements (Salt Lake City: Kofford Books, 2006).

20. Pew Forum, “A Portrait of Mormons in the U.S.,” http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=427 (accessed April 4, 2010).

21. Donald W. Parry, “The Flood and the Tower of Babel,” Ensign, January 1998, 35-41.

22. First Presidency, “The Origin of Man,” Ensign, February 2002, 26-30. The First Presidency in 1909 consisted of Joseph F. Smith, John R. Winder, and Anthon H. Lund.

23. Old Testament: Genesis-2 Samuel, Religion 301 Student Manual (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2003), 27-36.

24. Joseph Fielding McConkie, Answers: Straightforward Answers to Tough Gospel Questions (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1998), 158.

25. Richard Sherlock, “Mormonism and Intelligent Design,” FARMS Review of Books, 18 (2006): 45-81, http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/review/?vol=18&num=2&id=623 (accessed April 4, 2010).

26. Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution (New York: Cliff Street Books, 1999), 66-128.

27. Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul (New York: Viking, 2008), 88-110.

28. Fairbanks, Relics of Eden, 130.

29. See online instructions to generate these data at http://www.indiana.edu/~ensiweb/lessons/p.stdnt.pdf (accessed April 4, 2010).

30. National Academy of Science, Science, Evolution, and Creationism, 30.

31. Fairbanks, Relics of Eden, 20-27; Miller, Only a Theory, 103-7.

32. Forrest and Gross, Creationism’s Trojan Horse, 35-47.

33. Jones, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, Memorandum Opinion, 71.

34. For creationist/ID arguments, see the sources cited in the section on “Traditional Creationism and Intelligent Design.” For scientific responses, see Fairbanks, Relics of Eden; Miller, Finding Darwin’s God and his Only a Theory; Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True (New York: Viking, 2009); Niles Eldredge, The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism (New York: W. H. Freeman, 2000); Donald R. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Eugenie C. Scott, Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004); Matt Young and Taner Edis, Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism (Piscataway, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004).

35. Gish, Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record; also Michael J. Behe, “Experimental Support for Regarding Functional Classes of Proteins to Be Highly Isolated from Each Other,” in Darwinism: Science or Philosophy?, edited by J. Buell and V. Ahern (Richardson, Tex.: Foundation for Thought and Ethics, 1994), also available at http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/fte/darwinism/chapter6.html (accessed April 4, 2010).

36. Prothero, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, 78-85, 161-343.

37. Christian de Muizon, “Walking with Whales,” Nature 413 (September 20, 2001): 259-60.

38. National Academy of Sciences, Science, Evolution, and Creationism, 1-3; Donald Prothero, “Evolution: What Missing Link?” New Scientist, February 27, 2008, 35-41.

39. John Noble Wilford, “Fossil Skeleton from Africa Predates Lucy,” New York Times, October 1, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/science/02fossil.html (accessed April 4, 2010).

40. Miller, Only a Theory, 95.

41. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, 39-139.

42. Dan Jones, “Uncovering the Evolution of Bacterial Flagellum,” New Scientist, February 16, 2008, 40-43; Miller, Finding Darwin’s God, 192; Kenneth R. Miller, “The Flagellum Unspun: The Collapse of ‘Irreducible Complexity,‘” 2004, http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/design2/article.html (accessed April 4, 2010).

43. Fairbanks, Relics of Eden, 150-56.

44. John E.Jones, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, Memorandum Opinion, December 20, 2005, 78-79.

45. David Foster, The Philosophical Scientists (New York: Marboro Books, 1991), 79-83; Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space: A Theory of Cosmic Creationism (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1981), 1-20; John C. Lennox, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Oxford, England: Lion Hudson Press, 2009), 163-73.

46. David H. Bailey, “Evolution and Probability,” Report of the National Center for Science Education 20, no. 4 (2000): 23-24, also available at http://www.dhbailey.com/papers/dhb-probability.pdf; Fairbanks, Relics of Eden, 152-53; Ian Musgrave, “Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations,” December 21, 1998, in http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.html (accessed April 4, 2010).

47. Jeffrey Shallit and Wesley Elsberry, “Playing Games with Probability: Dembski’s Complex Specified Information,” in Young and Edis, Why Intelligent Design Fails, 121-38.

48. Richard Wein, “Not a Free Lunch But a Box of Chocolates: A Critique of William Dembski’s Book No Free Lunch,” April 23, 2002, http://www.talkorigins.org/design/faqs/nfl (accessed April 4, 2010).

49. William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 113.

50. Barry G. Hall and Daniel L. Hartl, “Regulation of Newly Evolved Enzymes,” Genetics 76, no. 3 (1974): 391-400; Miller, Finding Darwin’s God, 145-47.

51. Seiji Negoro, Ko Kato, Kazuhito Fujiyama, and Hirosuke Okada, “The Nylon Oligomer Biodegradation System of Flavobacterium and Pseudomonas,” Biodegradation 5, no. 3-4 (1994): 185-94; Miller, Only a Theory, 82-83.

52. Dan Krotz, “The Milano Mutation: A Rare Protein Mutation Offers New Hope for Heart Disease Patients,” May 28, 2002, http://www.eurekalert.org/features/doe/2002-05/dbnl-tmm061302.php (accessed April 4, 2010).

53. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, 130-31.

54. Adam Marczyk, “Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary Computation,” April 23, 2004, available at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/genalg/genalg.html (accessed April 4, 2010).

55. Joseph Boxhorn, “Observed Instances of Speciation,” September 1, 1995, http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html (accessed April 4, 2010); see also Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, 5-8, 168-89.

56. D. B. Wake, “Speciation in the Round,” Nature 409 (January 18, 2001): 299-300.

57. Nicholas Wade, “New Glimpses of Life’s Puzzling Origins,” New York Times, June 16, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/science/16orig.html (accessed April 4, 2010); Paul Davies, The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).

58. “The Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrancy with Exposition,” n.d., http://www.bible-researcher.com/chicago1.html (accessed April 4, 2010). One published source is Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, 6 vols. (Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1979), 4:211-19.

59. Ham, “Couldn’t God Have Used Evolution?”, 2007; West, “Is Darwinian Evolution Compatible with Religion?”, 2009.

60. John F. Haught, Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1995), 52; John F. Haught, God after Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000), 31.

61. Bart Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know about Them) (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 18.

62. John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).

63. Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 44.

64. James E. Talmage, “The Earth and Man,” pamphlet (Salt Lake City: LDS Church, 1931), rpt. in Juvenile Instructor 100, no. 12 (December 1965)): 474-77 and 101, no. 1 (January 1966): 9-15.

65. Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Reason, Vol. 7 of THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), 600-612.

66. Phillip E. Johnson, “Evolution as Dogma: The Establishment of Naturalism,” in Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics, edited by Robert T. Pennock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 59-76.

67. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, 67, 155.

68. William A. Dembski, “What Every Theologian Should Know about Creation, Evolution, and Design,” April 1, 1966, http://www.discovery.org/a/122 (accessed April 4, 2010); Michael J. Behe, “Philosophical Objections to Intelligent Design: Response to Critics,” July 31, 2000, http://www.discovery.org/a/445 (accessed April 4, 2010).

69. Robert T. Pennock, “Naturalism, Evidence and Creationism,” in in Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics, edited by Robert T. Pennock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 77-97.

70. Scott, Evolution vs. Creationism, 119.

71. Brigham Young, July 11, 1869, Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (London and Liverpool: LDS Booksellers Depot, 1855-86), 13:140-41.

72. John A. Widtsoe, Evidences and Reconciliations (1943; rpt., Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1960), 150.

73. Parley P. Pratt, Key to the Science of Theology (1855; rpt., Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1965), 102.

74. Whitcomb and Morris, The Genesis Flood, 233-38.

75. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, 67, 155.

76. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God, 80.

77. Ibid., 97.

78. Ibid., 101.

79. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, 2009, 68; Fairbanks, Relics of Eden, 53-54; Miller, Only a Theory, 97-98.

80. Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (New York: Pantheon Press, 2008), 146.

81. Miller, Only a Theory, 150-51; Coyne, Why Evolution Is True (2009).

82. Miller, Only a Theory, 99-107.

83. Kenneth Miller, “In Defense of Evolution,” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/defense-ev.html (accessed April 4, 2010).

84. Fairbanks, Relics of Eden, 170.

85. Francisco J. Ayala, Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion (Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2007), 5.

86. David O. McKay, “A Message for LDS College Youth,” BYU Extension Publications, October 10, 1952, 6-7; also published, nearly verbatim, in Report of the Semi-Annual Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, April 1968 (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, semi-annual), 92.

87. Haught, Science and Religion, 62.

88. Carl Sagan, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium (New York: Ballantine Books, 1998), 60.