Dr. Ken Miller, who spoke at SLU recently, upheld a theistic view of Darwinian evolution and attacked intelligent design theory as being unscientific. Dr. Miller did not adequately discuss the methodological naturalism underlying how evolution is taught and failed to address William Dembski’s argument for the scientific basis for ID in Dembski’s book, The Design Inference. Methodological naturalism is a philosophy which asserts that natural laws are adequate to account for all phenomena, thereby rending belief in the supernatural as superfluous. This philosophy is false since science cannot explain all phenomena (Miller acknowledged the latter but not the former); it can only explain what can be tested empirically. The scientific method is greatly limited in its investigation of origins since we cannot observe nor recreate the past. Yet the naturalistic philosophy under girding the teaching of Darwinian evolution has been extended to explain the formation of life and of the entire universe. Counter evidence to evolution is often ignored, minimized or distorted. For example, consider Dr. Miller’s, and coauthor, Dr. Levine’s, treatment of the origin of life in their 1993 Biology textbook. The authors rightly state that scientists do not know how life formed. Their statements that “highly organized structures of RNA and DNA must somehow have evolved” and “Once life evolved on earth” imply, however, that the origin of life by natural evolutionary processes was inevitable. Cogent evidence against the origin of life by natural laws is omitted. If counter evidence to speculative claims of evolution theory is not presented in our classrooms, then by default the philosophy of scientific materialism will fill the vacuum. Will the Voices Project give ID theory fair consideration by inviting one of their leading proponents to speak at SLU?

Joseph Dasso, MD, Ph.D.
Internal Medicine/Pediatrics Resident