A nationally known author, a local attorney and a University professor teamed up to argue on Wednesday night that a powerful being created all life and that evolution-supporting scientists engage in “intellectual totalitarianism” by ignoring proponents of intelligent design.
Author Dr. Geoffrey Simmons, attorney Tom Alderman and chemistry professor Jim Long presented the case for intelligent design as part of the Mars Hill forum, sponsored by the University Christian Fellowship. The event drew about 100 people to the EMU’s Fir Room
Alderman said that if an object is complex, has a purpose and has no plausible physical cause, it implies design. He said that physicists employ design in their work.
There is “a mountain of evidence that the universe was designed,” he said.
“Design has been proven to an extreme probability,” he said.
Alderman said scientists believe humans are complex machines without free will. Scientists prejudice their conclusions by ignoring the human consciousness, he said, and that the Catholic Church alienated science when it imprisoned Galileo in the 17th century for proposing that the Earth rotates around the sun.
“Science and religion are certainly different things, but they are not opposites,” Alderman said, “and they are certainly not mutually exclusive.”
Scientists’ prejudice leads them to deny hearing anyone who disagrees with evolution, which is an example of “intellectual totalitarianism,” Alderman said.
He also spoke about the recent court case, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, in which the judge decided that intelligent design was a religious theory that has no place in public school classrooms. Alderman said the lawyers did not handle the case well and that the loss set back the movement by years.
“It’s gonna be very difficult to use the courts,” Alderman, who is a Christian, said. “The argument needs to be won in the universities.”
“I’m confident that Genesis is true,” he said. “God’s deity and power are revealed in the cosmos.”
Alderman said that the Big Bang must have had a cause that is timeless and immaterial.
“It sounds like the God from the Bible,” he said.
Simmons, author of “What Darwin Didn’t Know,” showed pictures of the galaxy, the planets and a group of cells that would grow into a human being.
He said the improbability of our solar system being placed in The Milky Way Galaxy, a safe place away from black holes or exploding stars, shows an intelligent designer. He said the location of our planet in relation to the sun – the perfect distance to avoid scalding off our skin or freezing it the bone – shows a designer as well.
Cells, which are small enough to fit on the head of a needle, know how to develop and multiply in a rapid and complex fashion to turn into a human being, showing that they could not have evolved through trial and error.
“A single cell is not an accident,” Simmons said. “It’s like all the factories in this country combined.”
Simmons gave a list of living beings that he deemed too complex to have evolved. He said archeologists claim monkey skulls they find are pre-human to get their pictures in magazines and make more money.
Simmons said many animals, such as giraffes and blue whales, have no fossils on record or any record of species from which they could have evolved. Simmons said intelligent design supports the theories of natural selection and survival of the fittest, but neither of those theories proves evolution.
“Billions of years isn’t enough time,” Simmons said. “Nobody has shown that a dog can become a cat.”
Simmons said scientists do not ask what happened before the Big Bang.
“It’s time to tell them that the emperor is not wearing any clothes,” he said.
“I don’t believe evolution explains everything I see in this world,” Long said, but “I would not want intelligent design taught in (K-12) schools as a science.”
Long said teachers should encourage students to study the theory and to remain open minded.
Long said that he does not include evolution in his curriculum; instead, he teaches that a creator designed the cell with impressive power and subtlety.

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