Intelligent Design -Kirk Durston.

I believe in evolution, but I also believe that God created the universe.

Kirk Durston is a protestant and a PhD candidate at Guelph University (in Guelph, Ontario, Canada). He has been a proponent of Intelligent Design as a means to understand how life came to be. He doesn't claim that he has evidence that evolution is wrong (I'm unsure if he believes it or not though), but he claims to have developed a scientific method for testing if a mind that thinks of a design is needed in order for life to have reached the point that it has. He explains that method in this lecture and argues that life could not have reached the point it has without some kind of a design to it.

I have difficulty following him at times and I'm unsure if I grasp how his method works, although his talk is very interesting and I think he makes an excellent point when he talks about the mindset of contemporary academics who conclude that there is no possibility of ID as a hypothesis, when they don't think of developing any method to test it and they are simply discounting it because it is associated with religion.

19. The Book of Wisdom contains several important texts which cast further light on this theme. There the sacred author speaks of God who reveals himself in nature. For the ancients, the study of the natural sciences coincided in large part with philosophical learning. Having affirmed that with their intelligence human beings can “know the structure of the world and the activity of the elements... the cycles of the year and the constellations of the stars, the natures of animals and the tempers of wild beasts” (Wis 7:17, 19-20)—in a word, that he can philosophize—the sacred text takes a significant step forward. Making his own the thought of Greek philosophy, to which he seems to refer in the context, the author affirms that, in reasoning about nature, the human being can rise to God: “From the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator” (Wis 13:5). This is to recognize as a first stage of divine Revelation the marvellous “book of nature”, which, when read with the proper tools of human reason, can lead to knowledge of the Creator. If human beings with their intelligence fail to recognize God as Creator of all, it is not because they lack the means to do so, but because their free will and their sinfulness place an impediment in the way. - John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 1998

All Glory to God