I recently viewed the Ben Stein docu-argument, Expelled. The film leaves one with little doubt that within "accepted" scientific orthodoxy there is an organized and very zealous effort to deny legitimacy to the theory that there may be evidence of intelligent design in nature. Stein compellingly asserts the thought control and censorship that is being carried out by the "mainstream" Darwinian evolutionists is every bit as dangerous as the censorship and thought control that existed in Naziism and Stalinist Soviet Union. My sense of Stein's motive in producing the film is that it was less about defending intelligent design as a theory and more about cautioning us of the dangers of allowing any group to gain a stranglehold on "acceptable" thought and speech within a community.
The priests of Darwinianism, who currently dominate the creeds (textbooks) and temples (lecture halls) of academia pertaining to the origin of the natural world, have declared as heresy any notion that the observable complexity and order in nature indicate a higher intelligence participated in the originating process. Therefore, as far as they are concerned, any member of the scientific community who would dare to speculate otherwise is a heretic. Leading Darwinian atheist, Richard Dawkins, is so adamant in his refusal to even consider the possibility that there may have been some sort of creative influence in the origin of things, that he offers a far fetched speculation from science fiction that maybe once-upon-a-time a more highly evolved extra-terrestrial life form "seeded" the design scientists observe in nature.
At the end of the day, the controversy is more about competing ideologies than hard scientific "facts". No explanation of the origin of the universe can be definitively proven. Both Darwinism and Intelligent Design employ "evidence" from what remains uncertain and unseen (i.e., faith) to explain the mysterious unknowable. So, does anyone see the irony in the fact that advocates of Biblical Creationism (an overtly religious form of Intelligent Design), who historically have been known to execute people who disagreed with them and would probably resort to that again if they could get away with it, are the ones complaining the loudest about the current hegemony of the Darwinists? In either case, whether one is a creationist or a Darwinist, if free thought and free speech are curtailed, truth loses. It is always dangerous when any one group thinks it is authorized to control what everyone else is permitted to learn about and believe.
