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A post by Maynard

I don’t know whether I’m going to like “Expelled”, which opens in theaters this Friday. But Hollywood and the mainstream media have been doing their darndest to immerse us in a cauldron of political correctness. Being a disagreeable creature, I thirst for anything that promises to be contrary.

What is “Expelled” about? The press clips indicate it focuses on the conflict between evolutionists and creationists in the academy. I hope there’s more to it than that, because that is a battle I would rather not linger on. We’re here by the will of God, but is it unthinkable that He might have used an evolutionary process to do the job? Why must the pursuit of this question become prickly? In a nutshell, science tells us how and religion tells us why. These two outlooks should work together (like body and soul) to seek a uniform vision.

The clash of evolution versus intelligent design has become a proxy war as our culture wrestles with issues of atheism versus theism. Radical secularists attempt to misrepresent the Establishment Clause as a call for state-mandated atheism; an aggressively wrong-headed agenda that I vigorously oppose. I’m on board for the war, but the enemy is the repressive political ideology. Is it really necessary that we scrap with the evolutionists?

I view intelligent design (“ID”) as a discipline that is more philosophical than scientific. And it’s certainly appropriate that the hard sciences be cross-pollinated with philosophical questions; that’s what we’re doing when, for example, we expect a medical doctor to also learn medical ethics. ID, like ethics, raises hard questions and important challenges. But I can’t see it as a science in the sense that biology is. (I know some people put forth a rigorous technical argument in favor of ID, and I’m not dismissing that position; however that’s a long discussion in itself, which I’ll skip for the sake of brevity.)

Of course, it must be remembered that evolution is also something of a theory. That’s why they call is the theory of evolution. Duh!

Back in the bad old days, Galileo offended the dogma of the Church when he advanced his theory of heliocentrism. He was forced to recant this heresy, and spent his latter years under house arrest on orders of the Inquisition. We tell ourselves we’ve passed beyond the era of dogma into an enlightened age. But these days, the guardians of the One True Church of Political Correctness are equally aggressive in defending their canon. Recently Nobel laureate James Watson was forced into retirement when his observations gave offence to the Anointed Ones.

(As the song goes: “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.” But let’s move along.)

Anyway, with respect to the academic community, I lament to note that mine is apparently a minority opinion. This study indicates that only 7% of scientists believe in a personal God, as opposed to 72% that disbelieve — in sharp contrast to the general public, where a large majority accept God. Other studies suggest that the more educated an individual is, the more likely that person is to be an atheist.

For the record, I (Maynard) have a degree from Starfleet Academy, and in fact my faith was nurtured as it became clear that our most essential questions could not be answered by materialistic inquiry. I love science and I am grateful to the students of the material arts, to whom we all owe a great deal. But it’s Man’s vanity, rather than objective facts, that tempts us to think we can get by without God.