The Galileo treatment

Baylor jumps to the wrong side of a scientific revolution | Gene Edward Veith

Science changes. Though the sciences are based on objective facts, the interpretation of those facts--the ways of tying them together into a coherent system--keeps developing. As Thomas Kuhn has shown in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, when scientists discover more data, they must discard old models, as new models take shape. But between the models comes virulent controversy.

Just as religious institutions joined the scientific establishment of the time in trying to silence Galileo for presuming to question the notion that the earth was the center of the universe, so an educational institution with a religious base is harassing William Dembski, a key theorist of Intelligent Design, for questioning Darwinism.

In the Middle Ages, the model of the universe that placed the earth at the center explained the observed data. Later, telescopes brought in data that the geocentric model could not handle. An alternate model—the earth revolving around the sun—fit the data better. Similarly, Newton's mechanistic physics—with the model of the universe it assumed--had to give way to Einstein's physics, then quantum physics.