Abstract

According to evolutionist Francisco Ayala, Darwin’s greatest achievement was to show that the organized complexity of living things could be brought about without recourse to a designing intelligence. Given this view of Darwin’s achievement, what evolutionary biology has come to mean by “evolution” is an unintelligent or blind form of it. This was brought home to me two years ago at a debate in which I participated. I was invited, along with my colleague and friend Michael Behe, to debate Darwinists Kenneth Miller and Robert Pennock at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. The debate was initially titled “Blind Evolution or Intelligent Design?” Yet, when the debate actually took place on April 23, 2002, the program bulletin distributed at the event quietly dropped the word “blind” and titled the debate simply “Evolution or Intelligent Design?” The original title was more accurate. Intelligent design, the view for which Behe and I were arguing, is opposed to blind evolution, not to evolution simpliciter.