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Summer 2009 | Volume 67, No. 4
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Dembski Challenges Evolution on Darwin's Birthday
by Benjamin Hawkins
On the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, William Dembski, research professor of philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, challenged Darwin’s famed theory of evolution in the seminary’s chapel service, Feb. 12.
Christianity and Darwinian evolution put forward “radically different worldviews,” Dembski said. “I think the real challenge for the church now is not the atheistic Darwinists … but it is now the church itself and Christian higher education embracing this semi-materialistic worldview.”
According to Dembski, every worldview involves a creation story, a problem, a solution for that problem, and an expected culmination. For Christians, this involves a world, created by a wise God and marred by the sinfulness of man. As a solution to sin, the Son of God entered the world as Jesus Christ and died for the redemption of man. In the end, Christ will return again and the creation will be renewed. “Evolution comes to us and challenges us right at the point of creation,” he said.
This materialistic worldview has been infused even into Christian culture. Despite this fact, Dembski did not hesitate in the seminary chapel to support intelligent design, while also downgrading Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection to a hypothesis. A theory should both explain what a scientist observes while also gaining support from “independent evidence,” he said. “In fact, there is very little evidence for the power of natural selection.”
Dembski also made it clear that intelligent design (ID), a research program that flies in the face of Darwinism, is not creationism. “It is engineering,” he said. ID is a research project that seeks to discover evidence of design, or engineering, within nature. He pointed out that no human engineer has designed technology that can hold as much information in such a compact way as the DNA found in cells.
To view Dembski’s chapel message, access Southwestern Seminary’s chapel archives at www.swbts.edu/chapel.
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