Orson Scott Card On ID vs Darwinism

A good read. Upshot seems to be that ID should be rejected as science, but then so should Darwinism, and for the same reasons.

excerpt:

Science thus becomes a game -- you are allowed to play only within the rules. But within that sandbox, scientists have made extraordinary discoveries that have transformed our understanding and our lives.

The tragedy is that many scientists forget that the assumption of mechanical causation has not been proven and cannot be. It is a natural human trait to want to believe that what we accomplish in our lives is real, that is has permanent, lasting value. Not all people are able to maintain the humility of a true scientist -- knowing that all his work will inevitably be contradicted, amplified, or otherwise redone by somebody else. And it is profoundly annoying to some of them, at least, to have to admit that they are only playing a game.

No! It's the real world we're dealing with!

But it's not. It's guesses about the real world, and only guesses that pertain to mechanical cause.

Today, though, we have many scientists who think they're saying something intelligent when they proclaim that this or that discovery makes it "no longer necessary to believe in God."

The necessity of believing in God is not a topic that science can even address. No scientist is competent, using the tools of science, to make even the slightest useful remark on the subject. But the Darwinists refuse to admit that they are making an enormous leap of faith when they say, "We can explain everything without reference to God."

Even if this statement were remotely truthful, it would still have this unspoken limitation: Ability to explain things without reference to God does not prove or even indicate the nonexistence of God.

And the statement is not truthful. It is invariably made by scientists working in fields where we are most ignorant. When scientists began to study molecular psychology, for instance, we started getting ludicrous, unscientific statements like, "There is no longer any reason to believe in the existence of the soul."

Such statements are always accompanied by clear indications that what we're seeing is faith and hope (but not charity): "Within ten years, scientists expect that we will know/be able to/understand/learn ..."

Yeah, right. That's a guess, folks. Wishful thinking.

In the case of Darwinism, however, the faith is no longer justified. Darwin, working in an era before we understood the workings of the cell, simply had no way of knowing just how complicated things could get. Clearly "random variation plus natural selection" is not a sufficient explanation.

Ben Stein's movie clearly documents the fact that Darwinists are trying to ban good scientists from the field, not because (or not just because) they believe in God, but because they question the dogmas of Darwinism and publicly point out the flaws in the Darwinian model.