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Letters

Letters

Intelligent Responses • Seeing Red For Green • Resistance is Profitable • Operation Peace • Not Choosing But Drowning • No Philosophy • No Excuse • No Surprise • No History, Please!

Intelligent Responses

DEAR EDITOR: Two very thoughtful letter- writers complain in Issue 65 that I have been unfair in connecting Intelligent Design Theory (ID) with Creationism.

They are quite right that one can read ID texts without noticing this connection, because the authors make selected concessions to modern science.Michael Behe, for instance, freely allows that the earth may be ancient and that some ‘microevolution’ does take place by natural selection. However, for ‘macroevolutionary’ change – a real novelty – to occur, a designer is absolutely necessary. He explains how this may have worked:

“Suppose that nearly four billion years ago the designer made the first cell, already containing all the irreducibly complex chemical systems discussed here and many others…The cell containing the designed systems then was left on autopilot to reproduce, mutate, eat and be eaten… and suffer all the vagaries of life on earth.