By: Shafer Parker, FBB Speaker

Good news! It appears the Overton Window may be shifting to allow intelligent design to finally be accepted as within the range of views that can be discussed when elite scientists get together in public. “What is the Overton Window,” you ask? It’s an idea born in the world of politics. Developed by American policy analyst Joseph Overton, his window frames “the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time.”

Although the scientific community bills itself as wedded to research, willing to go wherever the evidence leads, science is at least as political as politics, and few scientists will dispute that an Overton Window continues to guide what kind of research gets funded, published, or talked about in polite society. Which brings us to the Discovery Institute, the world’s foremost promoter of the argument that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.” 

You can imagine how poorly intelligent design flies in a community committed to a strictly materialistic explanation for life, the universe, and everything. And sure enough, if you go to the Discovery Institute website a little research turns up a list of articles that amounts to a litany of persecution.

Headlines include: PBS Yanks Science Film on Intelligent Design From Website; Darwin’s Dilemma: Evolutionary Elite Choose Censorship over Scientific Debate; and Iowa State Faculty Admit Intelligent Design Played Role in Scientist's Tenure Denial.

The good news, however, is that the Overton Window may have suddenly enlarged, allowing, perhaps for the first time, a public discussion of intelligent design at a meeting hosted and chaired by world-class evolutionary scientists and institutions like Cambridge University and the Technical University of Munich. It happened earlier this month (May 2022), in Israel, at the Potential and Limitations of Evolutionary Processes conference, and while the conference featured chemistry Nobel prize winners Ada Yonath and Sir John Walker, and numerous well-known evolutionary theorists such as University of Chicago molecular biologist James Shapiro and Georgia Tech biophysicist Jeremy England, it also included a handful of intelligent design scientists, including Michael Behe of Lehigh University, author of the paradigm-shifting book, Darwin’s Black Box.

Amazingly, intelligent design scientists were not merely tolerated at the conference, they were allowed to call out evolutionists for their failure to play by the rules the world is led to believe guides their behaviour. Rice University chemist James Tour, for instance, “argued that origin-of-life researchers have deceived the public into believing that we are close to understanding how life formed, when we are not.” Discussions between the two sides were courteous enough that reporter Granville Sewell could state that “the organizers attempted, to a large degree successfully, to create an atmosphere of mutual respect between those who emphasized the ‘potential’ of evolutionary processes, and those who emphasized their ‘limitations.’”  

Why attitudes toward intelligent design are shifting is no mystery. Whatever critics may allege, intelligent design is based upon science, and recent books published by Discovery Institute authors have gathered endorsements from Nobel Prize winners and other distinguished scientists. But, you may ask, what is the science that is compelling the rise of intelligent design? Oddly enough, much of it is coming from the other side. Evolutionists are increasingly faced with the reality that Darwin’s theory has simply failed. Modern science is good enough that with a high degree of assurance it can be said that if answers lay within Darwinism, they would have been found already. Instead, Darwinism has proven to be a dead end, time and again.

In another article entitled “3 Realities Chance Can’t Explain About Life’s Origins That Intelligent Design Can,” Granville Sewell has written “the theory that the universe was crafted intentionally explains many essential realities that theories based on spontaneous chance do not.” Then he lists three realities that no chance-based theory can explain: (1) the origin of life, (2) the origin of advanced life forms, and (3) the origin of human intelligence and consciousness.

“Well, duh,” I suspect some of you are tempted to say. “Anyone should be able to see that.” Maybe, but for almost two centuries the world’s leading thinkers didn’t see it because they deliberately looked away. They did not want to see the truth, and in many cases did not hesitate to say so. But they’re starting to look now, even if they don’t like what they see. “The argument for intelligent design could not be simpler or clearer,” Sewell writes. “Unintelligent forces alone cannot rearrange atoms into computers and airplanes and nuclear power plants and smartphones, and any attempt to explain how they can must fail somewhere because they obviously can’t. Perhaps this is the best way to understand why explanations without design will never work, and why science may finally be starting to recognize this.”

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