The December 18th Doonesbury comic strip might have been clever but it was deceptive and dishonest in it’s content. The strip begins with a doctor looking at an x-ray image. He is thinking to himself that “he hopes he (the patient) is only a Sunday creationist.” In the next frame the patient finds out he has TB. The doctor is better looking and looks more intelligent than the poor “creationist”. The doctor reassures him that they have caught the disease early.
Patient: “So my prognosis is good?”
Doctor: “Depends. Are you a creationist?”
Patient: “Why yes I am. Why do you ask?”
Doctor: “Because I want to know if you want me treat the TB bug as it was before antibiotics? Or the multiple drug resistant strain it has since evolved into.”
Patient: “Evolved?”
Doctor: “Your choice. If you go with the Noah’s Ark version, I’ll just give you Streptomycin.”
Patient: “Ummm…what are the newer drugs like?”
Doctor: “They’re intelligently designed.”
First of all, I understand the fundamentals of humor. I know that Trudeau was trying to exaggerate to make a humorous point. But my concern is that this is how intellectually bankrupt the average Christian is portrayed in the media. Gary Trudeau is a smart man. I presume he is smart enough to know that his comic strip does not represent the Intelligent Design position. And if he does realize this is not the position of the ID proponents then he is being intellectually dishonest for the sake of a laugh.
Not a single advocate of Intelligent Design that I am aware of discounts the “change over time” that happens within a species or organism. My friend Dr.Ray Bohlin writes this at the Probe website (www.probe.org).
“Much of the reason for evolution’s privileged status has been due to confusion over just what people mean when they use the word evolution. Evolution is a slippery term. If evolution simply means “change over time,” this is non-controversial. Peppered moths, Hawaiian drosophila fruit flies, and even Galapagos finches are clear examples of change over time. If you say that this form of evolution is a fact, well, so be it. But many scientists extrapolate beyond this meaning. Because “change over time” is a fact, the argument goes, it is also a fact that moths, fruit flies, and finches all evolved from a remote common ancestor.”
No thinking person could dispute the “change over time” component of evolution. When the word evolution is tossed about are we speaking of microevolution, small changes within a species over time, or are we talking about macroevolution, major mutations from one type of organism to another? I willingly concede the microevolution. Macroevolution is still quite debatable.
I believe in a Creator God. But I will aggressively seek the latest medications to fend off the microevolution of a disease. I see no intellectual dishonesty in that position. In Paul’s letter to Timothy he wrote…
God doesn’t want us to be shy with his gifts, but bold and loving and sensible. 2 Timothy 1:7 The Message
God has given us a mind and the freedom to use it.
Gil Herren
"Microevolution", on a time scale disconnected from our own "75 years and out (unless you’re Noah)", becomes simply "evolution" when viewed in geological time. One can, in this case, have his cake and eat it, too — it is possible to see God in evolution, and this may be a tenet of the ID catechism, but it is not science (as it is not provable, nor derivable from compelling data from a smaller scale study), and to teach that the universe is too complex to have been made once (at the Big Bang) and then left alone to develop over time is to weave a golden thread of religion into the multi-hued cloth of science — looks nice, but adds no warmth. The Big Bang, whatever that was, is the only nod science will attribute to the mysterious mind of God, regardless of how wonderously made we may seem to be.