Amanda Onion of ABC News writes on April 1, 2002 "...Unlike past movements to include the biblical theory of creation in school's science plans, proponents of Intelligent Design deny their agenda is a religious one. Behe explains the theory points out weaknesses in Darwin's theory of evolution and tries to present the 'best explanation of how the world got here.' The fact that the theory's explanation is mystical, says Behe, is beside the point. ..."

Source: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DailyNews/evolution020401.html

Michael Behe at UNM, March 4th, 2002:

"I'm not a creationist. I'm a biochemist."

Michael Behe at Calvary Chapel, March 6th, 2002:

"But a Darwinist cannot invoke angels adding staples to traps, because the angels are on OUR side"

From "The Bible Answer Man" with Hank Hannegraff and Michael Behe talking about Behe's book, "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution", aired Monday, March 20, 2000:

Hank - "Is it fair to say that the inevitable conclusion of this kind of complexity is that there is intelligent design, thus, an intelligent designer?"

Behe - "Sure, that's absolutely the case. If there is intelligent design, by definition, the design is the responsibility of a designer. And so, we're talking about some intelligent entity. Some intelligent agent who is responsible for setting up life in this fashion.'

Hank - "Now, your purpose is not to identify the intelligent designer, but to point in that direction?"

Behe - "Yes. That's exactly right. I wrote the book. I try to stay completely in my role as a scientist although I'm certainly a Christian and I believe the designer is God."

Hank - "You did write a forward to William Dembski's book, "Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology." So, inevitably we are lead to the conclusion that there is a God. That we are fearfully and wonderfully made. That all the days are gained for us are written in his book before one of them came to be. But you're winning a war by strategy as well, aren't you?"

Behe - "Sure."

Behe - "I'm not trying to smuggle religion in. Just because the conclusions have theological implication doesn't mean they follow from theological premises."

Behe - "The purpose of the book is to argue simply for intelligent design..."

Hank - "And one of the reasons you wrote a forward to William Dembski's book, "Intelligent Design" is you see a bridge between science and theology that ultimately does point to God."

Behe - "That's right."

From the next day's "The Bible Answer Man," Hank Hannegraff's opening monologue for Tuesday, March 21, 2000:

"Yesterday I had on the program a very interesting guest, Michael Behe. We were talking about "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution", talking about incredible complexity, irreducible complexity, demonstrating beyond the shadow of a doubt that there has to be a designer. And certainly, as Christians we see that designer as God. ... In "Darwin's Black Box" Michael Behe shows all of this complexity and how inevitably it leads to a designer as opposed to evolution."

 

William Dembski

William Dembski is a Senior Fellow of The Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.

In an article by Richard John Neuhaus from First Things 121, March 2002, Neuhaus writes "With respect to the origin and complex development of life forms, clear thinking begins with recognizing what we do not know. Dembski puts it nicely: 'An argument from ignorance is still better than a pipe dream in which you’re deluding yourself. I’m at least admitting to ignorance as opposed to pretending that you’ve solved the problem when you haven’t.' ”

Source: http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0203/public.html

"I've just gotten kind of blase about submitting things to journals where you often wait two years to get things into print," he says. "And I find I can actually get the turnaround faster by writing a book and getting the ideas expressed there. My books sell well. I get a royalty. And the material gets read more."

- -William Dembski in The Chronicle of Higher Education Dec. 21, 2001

"An object that is designed functions within certain constraints. ... Transgress those constraints, and we as well as our society will suffer. There is plenty of empirical evidence to suggest that many of the attitudes and behaviors our society promotes undermine human flourishing. Design promises to reinvigorate that ethical stream running from Aristotle through Aquinas known as natural law."

William Dembski, Science and Design, http://www.discovery.org/viewDB/index.php3?program=CRSC&command=view&id=62

 

Phillip Johnson

Phillip Johnson is an Advisor of The Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.

"The gospel is not the writing. It’s described in the writing, but the Book of Mark isn’t 'the Way, the Truth, and the Life'—Jesus is. It’s apparent in the Christian gospel that he is a living presence with whom you can make contact today. I sometimes say, when speaking in Christian circles, that I’m convinced that Jesus was who he said he was and did what he set out to do... "

http://www.arn.org/docs/johnson/le_berkeleysradical.htm

"...Jesus will still be active in the world when most of what we call 'modernism' is gathering dust on library shelves. ..."

http://www.touchstonemag.com/docs/issues/14.6docs/14-6pg10.html

"... we cannot teach seriously about God even in universities, because God is deemed to be a subject that can only make trouble for everyone. If God is truly dead and buried, this attitude is defensible, but if he comes back into the world as I expect he will, it is going to look very silly..."

http://www.touchstonemag.com/docs/issues/15.8docs/15-8pg11.html

Rob Boston writes in Church & State, April 1999, that "Johnson calls his movement 'The Wedge.' The objective, he said, is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the non-existence of God. From there people are introduced to 'the truth' of the Bible and then 'the question of sin' and finally 'introduced to Jesus.' 'You must unify your own side and divide the other side,' Johnson said. He added that he wants to temporarily suspend the debate between young-Earth creationists, who insist that the planet is only 6,000 years old, and old-Earth creationists, who accept that the Earth is ancient. This debate, he said, can be resumed once Darwinism is overthrown. (Johnson, himself an old-Earth creationist, did not explain how the two camps would reconcile this tremendous gap.)..."

http://www.au.org/churchstate/cs4995.htm

"Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools." (American Family Radio, Jan 10, 2003 broadcast, in which Johnson "discusses his book The Right Questions, encouraging Christians to actively debate issues of eternal value.")

Source: http://www.afr.net/todaysissues/tibestof.shtml

"We once knew who the true God was and were able to proclaim it frankly. But since about 1960 we've been hiding from that. We've been trying to pretend that all religions are the same." (Christianity Today, Dec. 3, 2002).

SFGate.com profiled Intelligent Design movement leader Phillip Johnson on April 21. Author Louis Freedberg writes "Unlike Bryan, the three-time presidential candidate who took on Clarence Darrow in the 1925 Scopes trial, Johnson has never challenged evolution in a court of law -- but he easily could have. ... Johnson says he is an ordinary Christian who regularly attends the First Congregational Church in Berkeley. But when pressed, he avoids answering pointed questions, including his views on just who the intelligent designer is. 'It certainly could be God, a supernatural creature, but in principle it could be space aliens of high intelligence who did the designing,' he says. ... He won't say whether he is or isn't a creationist. 'I won't answer that. That's like asking me if I was ever a member of the Communist Party.' ..."

Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/04/21/IN214026.DTL

Phillip Johnson identifies the "Intelligent Designer" at last!

Was it Zeus? Odin? A bug-eyed alien? No, says Phillip Johnson, Berkeley law professor and acknowledged leader of the "Intelligent Design Movement." In a 7 May article by Steve Maynard of the Tacoma News Tribune (and also posted on the Discovery Institute's web site), regarding a speech by Johnson in April at Pacific Lutheran University, Maynard states "Johnson said he and most others in the intelligent design movement believe the designer is the God of the Bible." Maynard also writes that "...a University of Washington psychology professor said intelligent design proponents are only rehashing the old arguments of biblical literalists. 'As far as I can tell, it's an effort to dress up the old Creationist argument in what appears to be new clothes,' said David Barash, an evolutionary psychologist who has a doctorate in zoology. 'But in fact,it's the same old clothes. Intelligent design implies an intelligent designer, and that's God.' "

Source: http://www.discovery.org/news/life%27sIntelligentDesign.html

"The mind that is clever at test taking and reasoning is also clever at deceiving itself. So you see, you can't rely on your own mind because it will betray you and trick you."

- --From Philip Johnson's appearance 12/19/2000 on Bible Answer Man

In response to a caller's concern about pro-evolutionists ability to come back with responses to challenges: "If you get into things like trying to deal with the fossil record overall, you get into a tremendous amount of scientific detail and the other side can always bluff effectively because they have lots of information and slides and so on. One of the people we debate, Kenneth Miller, has written a book that's against intelligent design, master bluffer, so you have to be up on a whole lot to catch him; you usually don't have enough time. [Richard Dawkins] is a master bluffer too. And because they can speak with all the authority of science behind them they can get away with a lot of stuff the critic can't. Now that's good for us. I don't envy them, because when you can get away with stuff that's when you're subject to corruption."

- -From Philip Johnson on Bible Answer Man, 12/20/00

"...the first thing that has to be done is to get the Bible out of the discussion. ...This is not to say that the biblical issues are unimportant; the point is rather that the time to address them will be after we have separated materialist prejudice from scientific fact."

"The Wedge", Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, July / August 1999

"Intelligent Design is an intellectual movement, and the Wedge strategy stops working when we are seen as just another way of packaging the Christian evangelical message. ... The evangelists do what they do very well, and I hope our work opens up for them some doors that have been closed."

("Keeping the Darwinists Honest", an interview with Phillip Johnson, Citizen Magazine, April 1999)

"...I think is central to Christianity--that the creation was meant to culminate in human beings who are created in the image of God and who are different from everything else. So this is another area in which evolutionary thinking, in so far as it says, 'Well, human beings really are just another part of the animal world like any other'--the 'third chimpanzee,' as the title of one book has it, is profoundly anti-Christian, and again, if it's true, perhaps Christianity should be given up as a bad show. Now it isn't true at all. ..."

Communique: A Quarterly Journal, Spring 1999, by Jeff Lawrence, http://www.arn.org/docs/johnson/commsp99.htm

"If it turns out that the evolutionary theory is what's mistaken, ... I would say that the theistic and Biblical worldview has been tremendously validated."

Communique: A Quarterly Journal, Spring 1999, by Jeff Lawrence, http://www.arn.org/docs/johnson/commsp99.htm

 

Richard Weikart

Richard Weikart is a Fellow of The Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.

"First, Hitler embraced a world-view that denied any personal God or transcendent moral standards. Rather the cosmos and human history were products of an impersonal Fate, Providence, or Destiny, synonymous with natural laws. Second, since Hitler believed that nothing exists beyond nature, he tried to find his purpose in life in obeying the iron laws of nature. Darwinian biology was especially significant in this regard, as he tried to apply its lessons to politics and society. Darwinism—especially forms of it often disparagingly called Social Darwinism today—taught him that life is a constant struggle for existence leading to biological progress. Hitler embraced eugenics and racial extermination of allegedly inferior races as means to improve the human species and foster progress."

Source: http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2001/002/6.18.html

 

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