Brennan AngelHow can someone explain the world they live in? Is nature just a coincidence, or was it designed by some intelligent force? Why is there such a complexity to everything around us?
These questions were the topic of debate in Chumash Auditorium during the Associated Students Inc.’s True Life series discussion about intelligent design. Paul Nelson, professor at Biola University’s Science and Religion program, and Michael Shermer, columnist for Scientific American as well as publisher for Skeptic Magazine, took to the podium in front of Cal Poly students to argue about how life began and how it managed to get to the present day.
Each speaker was given 30 minutes to present their case, which they did with the accompaniment of PowerPoint slides. Then the audience was given the opportunity to ask questions to the speakers.
Shermer kicked things off with a brief overview of evolution, focusing on some of the common misconceptions about the theory and then pointing out the undermining scientific methodology used to test it.
“I think it’s one or the other,” he said afterward when asked about whether or not intelligent design and evolutionary theory could coexist.
“(Intelligent design is) presented as an alternative to evolution. I mean, if you want to argue that God created the laws of nature and set the universe up running and off it went, yeah, OK, that’s fine. That’s not part of science.
“It’s perfectly legitimate to ask: ‘where did God come from?'” he added.
Nelson used his 30 minutes to ask the audience to consider other sources of knowledge outside of science.
“I want to rethink the foundations and try to do so in a way to get people thinking,” he said.
“I myself am doubtful that many of the problems of evolutionary theory will be solved using its current tools,” Nelson said. “Evolutionary biology has learned a lot in 150 years; it’s valid, solid knowledge, and that would have to be incorporated into any new theory of intelligent design.”
Nelson also felt, despite using many cellular examples to support his inference of intelligent design in nature, that appealing to just science would not reveal all the answers.
“I think that on these deep questions on where did we come from, what’s our essential nature as beings and so forth, we don’t evaluate them just using science or just using philosophy or theology,” he said.
Most of the crowd stayed until the very end of the question-and-answer session and even waited to speak one-on-one with the debaters themselves.
“This is the kind of talk I would want to hear if I were 18 years old and I was just beginning to think about these things,” Nelson said.