Free Speech
Intelligent Design
Postcard from Dusseldorf: “This Is Science Upside Down”
I’ve been working at a university in Dusseldorf for three weeks, just returned. While visiting Germany, I had lunch at Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig’s house. Lönnig is an ENV contributor and Senior Scientist, Department of Molecular Plant Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research (retired). Here’s a picture I took in his back yard, in Köln. I asked him if he bred all the flowers in his yard, and he said his wife did all that.
Wolf-Ekkehard told me he has received invitations to talk on ID at several universities in recent years, but the usual suspects always hear about it and pressure the university to rescind his invitation, successfully several times. One thing he noted is that if you rail against evolution without any good arguments, nobody gets particularly upset. But the better your arguments are, the more violently they oppose you.
He said, “This is science upside down. Normally the better your arguments are, the more people open their minds to your theory, but with ID, the better your arguments are, the more they close their minds, and the angrier they become” (not an exact quote of course).
Granville Sewell is a mathematician at the University of Texas, El Paso, and the author of In the Beginning: And Other Essays on Intelligent Design (Discovery Institute Press) and other books.