[Luke_Wilbur]

Today's Intelligent Design concept is quite simular to the early twenth century thoughts of Jeans, Eddington, Whitehead, and J. S. Haldane tried to convert science into a modern ally of ancient superstition and create a new scientific mystical religion. Jeans and Eddington had assured everyone that real science and real religion were the same thing.

Their technique was to conclude from the fact that science had not demonstrated how the universe had come to be, that it must have been made by an intelligent creator; to go from the circumstance that science had not synthesised life to the assertion that the origin of life was a miracle; to make the uncertainty relation in quantum mechanics into an argument for human free will. Such books as Jeans's The Mysterious Universe, ostensibly based on science, were negations of science. Jeans's world was a mythological abstraction from science, an arbitrary reduction of all the concrete universe to a number of abstract categories.

The book credited with laying out the philosophical underpinnings of the modern intelligent-design movement was published in 1991 by Phillip E. Johnson, a law professor at Berkeley who claimed that Darwinian evolution is based on scant evidence and faulty assumptions. In 1996, a biochemist at Lehigh University, Michael J. Behe, offered scientific argument in favor of intelligent design. Mr. Behe introduced the idea that some living things are irreducibly complex, meaning that they could not have evolved and must have been designed.

Two years later, a mathematician who now works at Baylor University, William A. Dembski, claimed to have developed a mathematical "explanatory filter" that could determine whether certain events, including biological phenomena, develop randomly or are the products of design.

The classic experiment demonstrating the mechanisms by which inorganic elements could combine to form the precursors of organic chemicals was the 1950 experiment by Stanley Miller. He undertook experiments designed to find out how lightning--reproduced by repeated electric discharges--might have affected the primitive earth atmosphere. He discharged an electric spark into a mixture thought to resemble the primordial composition of the atmosphere. In a water receptacle, designed to model an ancient ocean, amino acids appeared. Amino acids are widely regarded as the building blocks of life.

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In 1969 a carbonaceous meteorite fell in Murchison Australia. It turned out the meteorite had high concentrations of amino acids, about 100 ppm, and they were the same kind of amino acids you get in prebiotic experiments like mine. This discovery made it plausible that similar processes could have happened on primitive Earth, on an asteroid, or for that matter, anywhere else the proper conditions exist.  - Stanley Miller

In 1924 a Russian biochemist, Aleksandr Ivanovich Oparin, wrote a pamphlet on the origin of life (based on ideas presented at the Russian Botanical Society in 1922) and provided what Irish physicist, John Desmond Bernal, called "the first and principal modern appreciation of the problem." Taking into account the recent discovery of methane in the atmospheres of Jupiter and the other giant planets, Oparin postulated that the infant Earth had possessed a strongly reducing atmosphere, containing methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor. In his opinion, these were the raw materials for the evolution of life.

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There is no fundamental difference between a living organism and lifeless matter. The complex combination of manifestations and properties so characteristic of life must have arisen in the process of the evolution of matter.

[Luke_Wilbur]

On August 1, 2005, a group of reporters with President Bush. The President’s remarks suggest that he believes that both intelligent design and evolution should be taught so that “people are exposed to different schools of thought.” Here are the President's relevent remarks.

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“Q: I wanted to ask you about the -- what seems to be a growing debate over evolution versus intelligent design. What are your personal views on that, and do you think both should be taught in public schools?

THE PRESIDENT: I think -- as I said, harking back to my days as my governor -- both you and Herman are doing a fine job of dragging me back to the past. (Laughter.) Then, I said that, first of all, that decision should be made to local school districts, but I felt like both sides ought to be properly taught.

Q: Both sides should be properly taught?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, people -- so people can understand what the debate is about.

Q: So the answer accepts the validity of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution?

THE PRESIDENT: I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought, and I'm not suggesting -- you're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes.”