John McCain: Can a man be US president if he listens to both sides?

William F. Buckley, addressing the horror felt by some when they discovered that US presidential contender John McCain (R) was speaking at a lunch hosted by ID central, the Discovery Institute in Seattle, offers,

It seems an ancient controversy, and of course it is. Fifteen minutes after Charles Darwin explained his theory of evolution, his disciples—apostles—ruled out any heresy on the subject of the naturalist explanation for human life. Young people are educated to think of the question in the grammar of the Scopes Trial, Clarence Darrow vs. William Jennings Bryan. That trial made for great naturalist theater. Mr. Bryan was not born either to become president or to explain how God could tolerate chicken pox, so Clarence Darrow wiped him into dust.

Buckley reminisces about his own introduction to the intelligent design controversy on his Firing Line show. He is unusually forthright about the fact that Darwinian evolution has generally been promoted to students as a sort of theology (or anti-theology):

In outlining epochal events in this quarrel, Johnson quoted the official directive on teaching evolution as it appeared in the 1995 position statement of the National Association of Biology Teachers. “The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, and natural process.”

That's why I have so little time for Christians in science who soothe that God and evolution are compatible. Of course they are, but evidence and Darwinism are not compatible, and Darwinism has long been upheld as an ersatz religion.

Check out my book on the intelligent design controversy, By Design or by Chance?.