For those UD readers who are not familiar with it, I recommend visiting ARN. On the right-hand side of the home page you will see a section entitled “The ID Report.” Here, UD’s very prolific author and commentator, Denyse O’Leary, posts on a regular basis. So do other authors, and one of my favorites is Roddy Bullock of idnetohio.
In this recent ARN essay, Roddy does an excellent job of summing up UD’s mission statement. Below is an excerpt. I encourage UD readers to check out Roddy’s contributions at ARN whenever they become available.
Naturalism, the unscientific crutch for unguided, purposeless Darwinism, turns scientific inquiry on its head. Suddenly a philosophy that presumes only unintelligent causation becomes gatekeeper to the intelligible world of scientific knowledge. Guideless, godless, guile usurps legitimate authority of evidence-based reason as the backdrop against which every hypothesis is judged as being “science”. And any claims that are apparently “religious”–or at least those that are congenial to a theological worldview–are marginalized, and can never be defeaters of “science”. Science defined by non-science defining competing science as non-science–naturalism is quite the wonderworker.
But what if naturalism is a lie? What if atheists are wrong? What if all material evidence were permitted to be considered freely, without naturalistic blinders? On the topic of origins, might Darwin’s mountain of truth-by-decree then look more like a molehill of lies-by-degree? What fear this must strike deep in the heart of every atheist and scientist of the National Academy of Sciences (excuse the redundancy). With respect to naturalism forcing a narrow range of “scientifically acceptable alternatives,” John Searles was correct in observing, “Acceptance of the current views is motivated not so much by an independent conviction of their truth as by a terror of what are apparently the only alternatives.” When it comes to the question, Where did we come from? philosophical naturalists would rather glory in a lie than face the terror of the truth.