The creation story retold by evolution does little to bridge the distance between faith and science, although “creation scientists” have tried, who, according to Ronald Numbers at the University of Wisconsin, “compress the history of life on earth into less than ten thousand years. To accomplish this, they attribute most of the fossil record to the brief period of the flood and its aftermath. They believe that the majority of plants and animals buried sequentially in the stratified rocks once lived together in the antediluvian world; thus these relics do not represent successive populations of flora and fauna spanning millions of years, as evolutionists and most other creationists would assert.” However, for David Mindell, a professor of Ecology …show more content…
Mindell tells us that “proponents of intelligent design claim that some features of life are too complicated to have evolved naturally. Although they emphasize that the designer is not necessarily God, proponents uniformly believe that God is the designer…” Mindell quotes law professor, Phillip Johnson, a proponent of intelligent design and author of Darwin on Trial: “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.” “Intelligent design proponents clearly believe that God is an active participant in creation, though they are divided as to whether this activity takes the form of front-loading all outcomes at the Big Bang, episodic intervention of the progressive creationism form, or other, less well-articulated possibilities. Theistic evolution, however, is ruled out or at best viewed as an ill-advised accommodation.” Intelligent design can be seen as “faith” taking “fact” seriously by arguing that the complexity of origins cannot be adequately explained by evolutionists. Scott, however, says that “even if natural selection were unable to explain the construction of irreducibly complex structures, does this mean that we must now infer that intelligence is required to produce such structures? And David Sloan Wilson argues: “Nature has always and correctly been regarded as a cornucopia of function. Darwin provided a new way of explaining how organisms become well-designed, but that they are well designed (for the most part) was never in doubt…Against this background, it is bizarre to claim that natural selection thinking is irredeemably speculative.” And then there is Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago, a professor of Ecology and Evolution, who says: [A]ll cases of