Red State Rabble

A group of SMU students conducted a silent protest at the Discovery Institute's Darwin vs. Design conference last week. They put together a flier made up of quotes from the Wedge Document, made posters, and went to the conference.

Now here's the best part: Remember all the crying from Discovery about censorship when faculty members protested having the conference on campus, and all the chest thumping about how "Darwinists" were afraid to debate the ID geniuses?

Here's what happened when the students showed up with their posters and fliers for the silent protest:

We began handing out fliers and were receiving mixed reviews - until a tall, lanky, and toothy man jittered his way over to us and demanded to know who was handing out these fliers. We all took responsibility, and he began ripping the flyers out of our hands, saying that we could not distribute anything of the sort. I told him we paid to go to school here and that we were students who could walk anywhere on our campus, and that it just so happened that we walked into McFarlin, and it also just so happened that we had fliers to distribute.

He didn't take too kindly to that, and in two minutes' time, we had two police officers who all of a sudden had a real job to do watching us instead of sleeping the night away in the back. I'm sure if we had been distributing thank-you notes expressing our gratitude for the institute coming to our campus, he would've given us a warmer reception

The students, who call the Discovery event more of an "indoctrination seminar" than a conference, report that Lee Strobel, the first speaker said "he believed the world's creator and designer was the 'God of the Bible.'"

"That's interesting," say the students, "seeing as how he said nothing of the God of the Jews, Muslims and other religions; apparently Christianity's God is the only one we have to believe in. And his entire speech dealt with differentiating atheists from Christians, where he seemed to use the word atheist as a synonym for 'Darwinist' or 'evolutionist.'"

Disappointed at not having heard any of the much promised evidence that supports ID theory, the students held up the signs:

• "Why do we have wisdom teeth if they do not fit our jaws?"
• "Why did it take 20 species of elephant to go extinct to get two species that survived?"
• "Why do the ribosomes (protein synthesizing machinery) in our mitochondria match those of bacteria?"

According to the student's report in the SMU Daily Campus News Michael Behe attempted to answer the question on ribosomes. Here's what he is reported to have said:

His answer was that ID theory does not allow for explanations regarding interspecies commonalities such as those implied in the question.

"In short," say the students, "his answer was that he couldn't explain it with ID theory."

Well, what can you explain with ID theory?

Here's Behe's description of how it might have happened according to the students:

... the Creator may have given humans similar ribosomes for no good reason. His logic was that when one sees a car with a radio, one can ask how that radio got there and there are many explanations. One such explanation was provided by Behe, and it was so very realistic: He said the radio could've fallen from an apartment and landed in the car, suggesting that a Creator could have simply thrown ribosomes all over the place, and they just landed in humans by chance.

Behe, who said in his testimony at the Dover trial that redefining science to let intelligent design in would also open the door to occult sciences such as astrology, now apparently believes that design should be defined to allow for chance.

I wonder how that will sit with his fellow design theorists who seem above all to fear random and unguided processes.

When some members of the group attempted to move closer to the front, they were escorted from the hall by SMU's finest.

There's more, much more. The story is long, detailed, and highly satisfying. Don't fail to follow the link and read it for yourself.

Francis Goldshmid, Junior, Biology B.S., Chemistry B.A.; Nicolas Sanchez: Junior, Biology B.S., Italian minor; Jani Brackett, Junior, Biology B.S., German B.A.; Desiree Brooks, Sophomore, Biology B.S., Chemistry B.A.; Ati Nayeb, Junior, Phsycology major, Biology and Chemistry minors; Mahmud Shurafa, Biology and Spanish double major, Red State Rabble salutes you. Well done!