Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Articles

A Plague On Both Their Houses

Mary Midgley thinks creationists and evolutionists need to overcome the bewitchment of their own thinking and learn how to talk to each other.

Intelligent Design Theory, which claims to provide a scientific rationale for Creationism, is now highly popular in the United States and is gaining ground in Britain. Considered as science it is apparently vacuous, yet its influence is growing rapidly. We surely need to try and understand this phenomenon.

The theory does not, as one might expect, merely aim to add a spiritual dimension to supplement accepted biological views, which would be quite unobjectionable. Intelligent Design (ID) is presented firmly as a scientific theory to displace existing ones.

…