Scientists need to hear the gospel, too.

Christ didn't come to straighten us out about how old the earth is. He said very little about that subject. He said a lot about sin, and love, and He loved us enough to die as a perfect sacrifice for our sin. Everybody needs that, whether they acknowledge it or not, whether they know it or not. Scientists need it, too.

David Heddle, whose blog is probably considerably more widely read than this one -- if not, it deserves to be -- recently posted on his problems with the Intelligent Design movement. I share them. The entire post is well worth reading, and I recommend it highly. He says, in part:

I would say to the ID movement:

1. If you're about science, then do science.
   
2. If you're about politics, then do politics.
   
3. If you're about promoting theism, then promote theism.

But if you are really about (3), then don't deny it and say you are about (1) but for some reason you are compelled to hire multitudes of lawyers and use the methods of (2).

He also writes that believing scientists, especially scientists in training, or who have recently finished their training, and are looking for positions, have been forced to be even quieter about their beliefs than in past times, because of the controversy generated by the ID movement. Where once you might have been able to say, in class, or in an interview, that you have some questions about origins, and are not sure there are scientific explanations for every aspect of origins, now you might try to avoid saying such things, knowing that, if you do, you are likely to be grilled about putting stickers in textbooks, or pushing the teaching of design in public schools as an alternative theory.

Although I am a long way from my training, and from looking for a position, my view is that Heddle is correct about this.

Pushing ID as it has been pushed may have done something even worse. It may have stopped some people's ears to the gospel, especially those of scientists. (Pushing young-earth creationism has also done that, I believe, but there isn't presently a YEC movement trying to change the texts in the public schools.) Science sees itself as threatened. Christianity has become associated with politics, as Heddle says. Scientists, like people in other professions, are not likely to listen to views from those they see as trying to cut away the very foundations of their profession.

I'm afraid that the ID movement has silenced believing scientists who might have been examples in the classroom and the laboratory, and has also turned people away from the real heart of Christianity -- Christ's solution to the sin problem. That's too bad.

Thanks for reading.