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Intelligent Design to be Taught in Australian Schools - Opponents Furious

SYDNEY, August 29, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - After decades of teaching the theory of Darwinian evolution as though it were established fact, school boards in Australia may rethink their approach. The Intelligent Design (ID) theory is making inroads with formerly skeptical members of the scientific community now that the mathematical improbability of the random and spontaneous generation of life has been more thoroughly analyzed.

Australian Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson told reporters earlier this month that ID would have a place with Darwinism should parents or schools be interested. This announcement coincides with an attempt by researchers at Harvard University to debunk the Intelligent Design theory, which is seen by many committed anti-religious secularists as a threat to their hold on the scientific community.

Some secularists are furious at the threat to their religious dogma that God could not have created the universe. Those scientists who have dared publicly to examine the case on its merits have faced severe professional sanctions, in some cases amounting to witch hunts.

A US-produced video used in Australia features Dr. Dean Kenyon, a Stanford trained biophysicist, who was censured by his departmental colleagues at San Francisco State University for allegedly teaching religion in his introductory biology course. Kenyon, no naïf in the academic world with postgraduate work at UC Berkeley, Oxford, and NASA, said that he lost his job for the mere mention that there were other theories than pure Darwinian random evolution. He fought the decision and has been reinstated.

Kenyon, co-author of the book, Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins, speaks of how his own research on the chemical origins of life and his examination of the fossil record caused him to question the naturalistic assumptions that allow most evolutionary scientists to ignore and reject all evidence of intelligent design in the universe.

Kenyon says on the video, “We have not the slightest chance of a chemical evolutionary origin for even the simplest of cells, so the concept of the intelligent design of life was immensely attractive to me and made a great deal of sense.”

But the possibility of any religious influence has enraged the secularist scientific establishment and is seen as enough to condemn a researcher to the crank gallery. A senior lecturer in evolutionary biology at the University of New South Wales, Rob Brook, said that the presence of religious ideas automatically discredits a researcher.

About Kenyon, he said, “I don't really know what is it that's motivating him, and I don't think that we're told publicly what it is that's motivating him, but a lot of the prime people in the intelligent design movement appear to have had religious conversions of some type or another.”

”They all seem to be people of deep religious faith,” said Brook in an interview on Australian Public Radio, “so one has to argue, is it their religious faith that's driving the agenda, or is it their science and the scientific process? And I'd say it's the former.”

Read coverage from Australian Public Radio:
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2005/s1447202.htm

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