That simple but very important point is made by Dr Santiago Collado, who lectures in the philosophy of nature at the University of Navarra in Spain, in a recent interview with Mercator.Net. Dr. Collado makes some other helpful remarks:
MercatorNet: What do you think accounts for the bitterness with which this battle is being fought in the US? Leading scientists are denouncing ID as a menace to science and a return medieval superstition.
The causes of the bitterness of the debate are complicated and involve many factors. I would say that one of them, importantly, may be traced to the links between the beginnings of Darwinism and certain cultural outlooks. Ever since the publication of The Origin of Species the scientific debate has been ideologically coloured by both detractors and defenders. Part of the problem is the particular sociological context of the US and the fact that some evolutionists adopt a materialist stance that is not open to a transcendent outlook.
By "particular sociological context" I take he means the culture wars between (generally speaking) orthodox Christians and secular humanists. The comment that "some evolutionists adopt a materialist stance that is not open to a transcendent outlook" is understated; some evolutionalists, including leading evolutionalists, are openly hostile to any sort of transcendent outlook. (But if humans are mere biological accidents, as they believe we are, why do they fuss so much?)
MercatorNet: You have argued that ID and Darwinism have a lot in common. Could you explain what you mean by that?
This would require a lengthy reply and is part of what I am currently working on. Briefly I would say that both parties are speaking at the level of science. The trouble is that together with scientific issues they very easily slip into discussions that go beyond the scientific level. This happens to defenders of both positions. It is quite difficult to reach an agreement over something held as a scientific issue when this is really not the case. In other words, the issues involved are much deeper than the level of most of the current discussion. Philosophers must handle the challenge of explaining these aspects. [emphasis added]
Again, a very important point — and it runs both ways, just as Dr. Collado states. From what I can tell, both neo-Darwinists and proponents of Intelligent Design make philosophical assertions or present scientific data within a philosophical framework. And the philosophical assumptions/foundations of Darwinian evolution are fraught with all sorts of dark problems, as Dr. Benjamin Wiker remarked in this 2004 IgnatiusInsight.com interview about his book (co-authored with Dr. Donald De Marco), Architects of the Culture of Death:
IgnatiusInsight.com: Darwin and Darwinian evolution have been, of course, very controversial for many decades. What do you think are the biggest misconceptions and incorrect notions about Darwin and his beliefs that exist today? How seriously is Darwinian evolution taken today in the scientific community?
Benjamin Wiker: I think there are two very serious misconceptions about Darwinism today. First, that Darwinism is a well-established theory, with no considerable intellectual difficulties. The second, one more directly related to Architects, concerns the essential moral implications of Darwinism. Generally, historians and scientists alike have tried to distance Darwin’s biology from the eugenics movement—an understandable move, given the ugliness of the eugenic programs of Nazi Germany. If we read Darwin, however, we find that he himself understood eugenics to be the obvious inference from his biological theory of evolution through natural selection. Natural weeds out the unfit; so should we, or at least keep the unfit from breeding. Further, he also understood quite clearly that his evolutionary account of morality, which destroyed the permanency of human nature, provided the most radical moral relativism possible. As for the scientific community, it generally accepts Darwinism without question, which means that it generally hasn’t studied the theoretical and evidential problems facing Darwinism. Happily, more and more scientists have found the courage to look at Darwinism with a clearer, more critical eye.
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