In Explaining Life's Complexity, Darwinists and Doubters Clash: New York Times (Monday)

Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science: New York Times (Tuesday)

It's the Times so you know it's biased before you read it:

At a recent scientific conference at City College of New York, a student in the audience rose to ask the panelists an unexpected question: "Can you be a good scientist and believe in God?"

Reaction from one of the panelists, all Nobel laureates, was quick and sharp. "No!" declared Herbert A. Hauptman, who shared the chemistry prize in 1985 for his work on the structure of crystals.

The correct question is "Can you be a good scientist and disregard the evidence that the origin and development of life cannot be explained by random mutation and natural selection?"

Another question with the wrong answer:

"One of the rules of science is, no miracles allowed," said Douglas H. Erwin, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution. "That's a fundamental presumption of what we do."

What do you call the tornado that blows through a junkyard and assembles a Boeing 747?

The appearance of biochemical machines that have been recently discovered are things where all the parts have to have been developed at the same time. Natural selection would not keep selecting incomplete versions of the clotting sequences. This contradiction is not being addressed head on, but Neo-Darwinists are distracting the public from awareness of the new challenges to Darwinism.

There's an appeal to miracles (or more precisely, the Neo-Darwinists of the future) that someone will discover how incomplete biochemical mechanisms were selected.

I think there's an Occam's Razor quality to saying design explains specified complexity and irreducible complexity better than random mutation and natural selection.

It's more than science, it's in the semiotic or rhetorical domain to understand the framing the question is the game that's being played here:

• Linking Intelligent Design with six day creationism.
  
• Saying that assuming the existence of God makes it not a science, while assuming the non-existence of God makes it a science.
  
• Linking ID to religion rather than to skepticism of random mutation and natural selection as explaining the origin of life.
  
• Denying history — the strong links between Darwin and his early advocates like Huxley with atheists like Marx and eugenicists.
  

The natural impulse to believe in a higher power is now effectively blunted by "science" which imposes in elementary and high schools a fundamental philosophical system of materialism and mocks the idea that the natural order points to the existence of a supernatural order.