Dear Mr. Grogan –

I too was very disappointed by the column you first wrote on the ID issue which you referenced today, for I have found your columns in general to be of a higher standard than is common with the Philadelphia Inquirer.

While I certainly agree with you in thinking that disagreement on the issue of ID will continue for a long time, I don’t think this conclusion is adequate from the point of view of the "bully pulpit" you enjoy as a newspaper writer. While few people can be expected to understand the complex biochemical events to which the ID’ers refer, a newspaper writer ought to draw careful distinctions and do the best he can to steer readers away from making automatic reactions and premature conclusions.

The Philadelphia Inquirer (with the notable exception of DeWolf and Wagner’s "Anti-ID stance is good old intolerance again, " 10/18/2005) has in my view certainly failed in this regard. It was embarrassing to see how the Inquirer jumped on the bandwagon of fundamentalist Darwinism, acclaiming Judge Jones as the best thing since liberty, the Constitution, and sliced bread ("Intelligent design ruling dashed in Dover," Dec. 21, 2005 editorial).

There has been no attempt on the part of the Inquirer or its writers to point out the egregious flaws in Jones’s reasoning, to correct his defamatory statement that ID proponents have not published in peer-reviewed journals, or even to nuance his assertion that all of science is based upon "methodological naturalism." The existence of Big Bang theory and Newton’s law of gravity should be sufficient to refute this notion – although it is true that both of these theories had to win acceptance over initial skepticism that they propounded a type of supernaturalism or occultism. The idea of "irreducible complexity" is no more or less "supernatural" than Big Bang or gravity. All it means is that the findings of molecular biology reveal that the complexity of life’s structures cannot have arisen in the time-constraints we know to apply to the evolution of life on earth, or according to the mechanism of natural selection (i.e. trial-and-error) postulated by Darwin.

These findings have been known for some time. According to a New York Times Report on evolution (Nov. 5, 1980) : "Biology’s understanding of how evolution works, which has long postulated a gradual process of Darwinian natural selection acting on genetic mutations, is undergoing its broadest and deepest revolution in nearly 50 years. At the heart of the revolution is something that might seem a paradox. Recent discoveries have only strengthened Darwin’s epochal conclusion that all forms of life evolved from a common ancestor. Genetic analysis, for example, has shown that every organism is governed by the same genetic code controlling the same biochemical processes. At the same time, however, many studies suggest that the origin of species was not the way Darwin suggested…Exactly how evolution happened is now a matter of great controversy among biologists."

For the Philadelphia Inquirer not to at least mention that the ID issue deals with macro-evolution (evolution in the large picture, as distinguished from the Darwinian micro-evolutionary aspect, which few people dispute) and that criticisms of this sort have been in existence ever since Darwin propounded his theory (and in fact they were criticisms of which Darwin himself acknowledged) does a real disservice to Philadelphia. It is embarrassing to find the Philadelphia Inquirer so completely abandoning its journalistic standards to endorse the delusions of grandeur of a district court judge whose reflections on science were as shallow as his manifest ignorance of the argument of Intelligent Design was profound.

Another problem raised by the attempt to stifle debate on Intelligent Design leads to the issue of progress in science. Are the findings of molecular biology, to which Darwin had no access, to be disregarded because they conflict with the presuppositions of Darwinian materialist-fundamentalism?

Let me give an example. One of the most powerful passages in the book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, by medical doctor and molecular biologist Dr. Michael Denton (lucid and informative, by the way – I highly recommend it) discussed the difference in the perception of the cell made possible by increased powers of magnification. In Darwin’s time, a cell could be magnified some several hundred times, leading to the view of the living cell as " a relatively disappointing spectacle appearing only as an ever-changing and apparently disordered pattern of blobs and particles which, under the influence of unseen turbulent forces, are continually tossed haphazardly in all directions."

By contrast, modern microscopic methods allow for magnification by a thousand million times… leading to the view "of an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design…" A long description follows, from which I only quote the following snippet: "We would notice that the simplest of the functional components of the cell, the protein molecules, were astonishingly complex pieces of molecular machinery, each one consisting of about three thousand atoms arranged in highly organized 3-D spatial conformation. We would wonder even more… particularly when we realized that, despite all our accumulated knowledge of physics and chemistry, the task of designing one such molecular machine – that is one single functional protein molecule – would be completely beyond our capacity at present and will probably not be achieved until at least the beginning of the next century. Yet the life of the cell depends upon the integrated activities of thousands, certainly tens, and probably hundreds of thousands of different protein molecules." (p. 328-9)

Dr. Denton’s book was published in 1986, and I am sure there has been a vast increase in knowledge of the cell since then. (Indeed, it would be interesting to follow up on this concerning the designing of a functioning protein molecule.)

In any case, may I recommend that you read Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box and other books like Dr. Denton’s, which will one day be seen as classics of the Intelligent Design movement. It is certainly very difficult for people to part with an old paradigm that has served them well. The history of science is littered with examples. But it is also a very exciting time, when old paradigms are challenged by more refined understandings. Neither Judge Jones nor the Philadelphia Inquirer has managed to catch a whiff of this excitement, and instead goads its readers and the public to new lows of reactionary conformism.

I urge you to distinguish yourself from the pack and strike out on your own to explore what is emerging as an exciting and thrilling new adventure.

Sincerely,

Caryl Johnston