You told me you have an open mind.  You told me you want to be intellectually honest.  

But how can you be intellectually honest if you don't have all the information? Below are some fascinating articles on evolution and ID. The first article is one of the most eye-opening articles I've ever read, and it's changed my outlook on science, academia, and the origin of life. It will be some of the best spent 10-20 minutes of your life.

Evolution

PHILLIP E. JOHNSON

A new movement made its public debut at a conference of scientists and philosophers held at Southern Methodist University in March 1992, following the publication of my book Darwin on Trial. The conference brought together as speakers some key figures, particularly Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, William Dembski, and me. It also brought a team of influential Darwinists, headed by Michael Ruse, to the table to discuss this proposition: "Darwinism and neo-Darwinism, as generally held in our society, carry with them an a priori commitment to metaphysical naturalism, which is essential to making a convincing case on their behalf" As I wrote in my introduction to the first edition of the papers from that conference,

I do not think the issue was ever really confronted on this question.... What the anti-Darwinists called metaphysical naturalism the Darwinists called "science," and they insisted that for science to cease being naturalistic would be for it to cease being science. To put the matter in the simplest possible terms, the Darwinist response to the question presented was not "No, that is wrong, because the case for Darwinism can be made without assuming a naturalistic perspective." Instead, they answered "So what? All that you are really saying is that Darwinism is science."

That may seem a deadlock, but the amazing thing was that a respectable academic gathering was convened to discuss so inherently subversive a proposition. I was sure that in the long run discussions of that sort would be fatal for Darwinism because they would reveal chat the theory finds its justification in philosophy, not evidence. Biologists have legitimate authority to tell us the facts that they observe in the field and in their laboratories. They have no authority to tell the rest of us what metaphysical assumptions we must adopt. Once it becomes clear that the Darwinian theory rests upon a dogmatic philosophy rather than the weight of the evidence, the way will be open for dissenting opinions to get a fair hearing. In a nutshell, that is the strategy. Now that several years have passed and a new century is here, it is time to review how the strategy has grown and progressed, to evaluate how far we have come, and to forecast what we expect to accomplish in the next decade. But first I need to explain the intellectual background in more detail.


The Background


Most persons who have written about creation and evolution have assumed that they were entering a debate over facts and evidence, and their objective accordingly has been to state in detail what they consider to be the facts and to support their conclusions with evidence. Darwinian evolutionary scientists assert confidently that the Genesis account is mythology, that the earth is billions of years old, that the first primitive living organism emerged from a chemical soup by some combination of chance and chemical laws, and that life thereafter evolved to its present diversity by natural means, guided by natural selection but not by God. Theistic evolutionists defend basically the same account, adding that the evolutionary process was sustained and guided by God in some manner that cannot be detected by scientific investigation. Biblical creationists defend the Genesis account, arguing that Darwinian evolution is bad or biased science while differing among themselves about such important details as whether the "days" of Genesis were twenty-four-hour periods or geological epochs, and whether Noah's flood was worldwide or local. The argument never goes anywhere.

The Darwinists hold the dominant position in the sense that only their position is taught in public education and promoted in the national media. Nevertheless, they are frustrated and worried that so much resistance remains, especially in North America. Scientists, educators, museum curators, and others have made determined efforts to convince the public, but public opinion polls indicate that the public isn't getting the message. Over 40 percent of Americans seem to be outright creationists, and most of the remainder say they believe in God-guided evolution. Less than 10 percent express agreement with the orthodox scientific doctrine that humans and all other living things evolved by a naturalistic process in which God played no discernible part. These figures, from recent polls, are practically unchanged from previous polls in the early 1980s. The Darwinists hold a commanding power position for the time being, but they have not convinced the masses. The situation is sufficiently precarious that in 1998 the National Academy of Sciences found it necessary to issue a guidebook on Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science (hereafter Guidebook) urging public school teachers to "teach evolution"-i.e., to promote the neo-Darwinian theory-regardless of local opposition.

By "teaching about evolution" the National Academy emphatically does not mean that the teachers should inform students candidly about why the subject is so controversial, and it especially does not want them to make students aware of the dissenting arguments (except perhaps in caricatured form, as presented by Darwinists like Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould). Instead, the Guidebook encourages teachers to mollify the religious people with vague reassurances that "religious faith and scientific knowledge, which are both useful and important, are different," and to deny that there is any real controversy because "there is no debate within the scientific community over whether evolution has occurred." To make the controversy disappear, the Guidebook defines evolution so broadly ("descent with modification") that it "occurs" every time a baby is born. Who can deny that babies are born, dogs are bred, or that the gene pool is constantly being modified?

This strategy of trivializing the subject might be effective if the science educators and their allies completely controlled the channels of communication, but increasing numbers of high school and college students come to the classroom already knowing that there are reasonable grounds for dissent, advocated by persons (such as the authors represented in this book) with impressive scientific and academic credentials. The best-informed students also know that prominent writers like Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Edward O. Wilson, and Daniel Dennett promote atheism in the name of evolutionary science, with the apparent approval of the scientific establishment. (Other authorities like Stephen Jay Gould purport to be more friendly to "religious belief," but only on the condition that religious authorities stick to questions of moral values and defer to science on all issues of fact.) When the National Academy dodges all the tough questions with evasive platitudes, it effectively teaches independent-minded students to regard the pronouncements of science educators with no more trust than they regard political or commercial advertisements. Eventually the scientific community will pay a high price for this campaign of prevarication.


The Two Models of "Science"


The science educators don't want to be dishonest, but they don't know any other way to deal with people who are so irrational as to deny that our existence is best explained by evolution. The educators also think that they are giving as much respect to religious belief as they honestly can, and that to be more explicit on the subject would merely cause unnecessary offense and provoke emotional opposition. In consequence, they assume that an honest dialogue is impossible, so they see no alternative but to counter the opposition with tactics of intimidation, evasion, and propaganda. Similarly, dissenters from evolutionary orthodoxy are often astonished that so many scientists cannot see that there is a genuine scientific case against Darwinism, and that widespread dissent cannot be dismissed out of hand as the product of ignorance or prejudice. Why can't eminent scientists seem to grasp the obvious point that finch beak variation does not even remotely illustrate a process capable of making birds in the first place?

The reason for this deadlock is quite simple. In our culture there are two distinct models of the scientific enterprise, and the persuasiveness of the case for Darwinian evolution depends entirely on which model you adopt.

In the first, the materialist model, science is seen as based by definition upon philosophical naturalism or materialism. For present purposes naturalism and materialism amount to the same thing. The first asserts that nature is all there is, while the second adds that nature is made up of matter, i.e., the particles that physicists study, and nothing else. (Philosophers tend to prefer the less familiar term physicalism, because it avoids the ordinary-language distinction between matter and energy-energy being also a physical entity.) Whichever term is used, every event or phenomenon is conclusively presumed to have a material cause, at least after the ultimate beginning. Within this first model, to postulate a non-material cause-such as an unevolved intelligence or vital force-for any event is to depart altogether from science and enter the territory of religion. For scientific materialists, this is equivalent to departing from objective reality into subjective belief. What we call intelligent design in biology is by this definition inherently antithetical to science, and so there cannot conceivably be evidence for it.

The second, or empirical model, defines science strictly in terms of accepted procedures for testing hypotheses, such as repeatable experiments. (I use the term "empirical" here in its dictionary sense of "arising from observation or experiment," as opposed to arising by deductive reasoning from philosophical axioms.) Of course scientific materialists also employ these testing procedures, but only up to the point where materialism itself comes into question. For true empiricists, whatever is testable by scientific methods is eligible for consideration. Within science one cannot argue for supernatural creation (or anything else) on the basis of ancient traditions or mystical experiences, but one can present evidence that unintelligent material causes were not adequate to do the work of biological creation. Whether some phenomenon could have been produced by unintelligent material causes, or whether an intelligent cause must be postulated, both ideas are eligible for investigation whether the phenomenon in question is a possible prehistoric artifact, a radio signal from space, or a biological cell.

If you adopt the materialist model, a materialistic evolutionary process that is at least roughly like neo-Darwinism follows as a matter of deductive logic, regardless of the evidence Otherwise, how could complex organisms exist? To say that they are the product of design by an unevolved intelligence, even one that works by guiding evolution, would be to repudiate materialism and hence to abandon science. Before life, especially intelligent life, can come into existence, it must evolve from unintelligent matter by a naturalistic mechanism that must by definition be unintelligent. That mechanism must employ some combination of random variation and physical law (the principle of natural selection being a sort of law) because nothing else could have been available.

This kind of deductive reasoning is so overpowering to materialists that Darwinists sometimes say that their theory is as self-evidently true as the basic principles of arithmetic. Evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald exemplifies this Darwinian logic:

Darwin only had a couple of basic tenets.... You have heritable variation, and you've got differences in survival and reproduction among the variants. That's the beauty of it. It has to be true-it's like arithmetic. And if there is life on other planets, natural selection has to be the fundamental organizing principle there, too.

The fallacy here is that from the proposition "heritable variation and differential survival occur," it does not follow that these factors have any substantial creative power.

Scientific empiricists, as I use the term, hold that there are three kinds of causes to be considered rather than only two. Besides chance and law, there is also agency, which implies intelligence. Intelligence is not an occult entity, but a familiar aspect of everyday life and scientific practice. No one denies that such common technological artifacts as computers and automobiles are the product of intelligence, nor does anyone claim that this fact removes them from the territory of science and into that of religion.

It is also common in scientific practice to infer the existence of something that is not observable (cold dark matter, extinct ancestors that were not fossilized) because it is thought necessary to explain the phenomena that are observable. For example, Carl Sagan's SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) radio telescopes search the sky for evidence of radio signals from space aliens. If they were to receive a signal containing a sequence of prime numbers, as portrayed in the movie Contact, they would conclude that it came from intelligent beings-without the need for independent evidence of the existence and nature of the aliens.

Evidence of intelligent design is permissible in such cases because it does not conflict with materialist metaphysics, the aliens being presumed to have evolved by natural selection. The proposition that the biological cell is the work of intelligence is out of the question for materialists not because of the evidence but because-in the words of famed Harvard University geneticist Richard Lewontin-"[our] materialism is absolute, we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

The confusion between these two models sets the stage for an unproductive argument that can never go anywhere. Scientific materialists think that advocates of intelligent design (ID) are either irrational or dishonest because they are advocating as science a proposition that ought to be confined to religion, namely the claim that scientific evidence points to the reality of a designing intelligence in the origin and development of life. Moreover they claim to have positive evidence for intelligent design in biology when the rules of science-as-materialism specify that such a thing cannot exist. Materialists classify such people not as empiricists but as "creationists," a term that in materialist jargon means biblical literalism and is inherently pejorative, suggesting a combination of irrationality and intellectual dishonesty. Hence materialists insist that "creationism," including any consideration of ID, must be banned from scientific discussions, and even from public discourse altogether, as a reprehensible and unconstitutional attempt to pass off religion as science.

We who are willing to consider evidence for ID, on the other hand, think of ourselves as the true empiricists and hence the true practitioners of scientific thinking. From our standpoint it is the materialists who are the "fundamentalists," in the pejorative sense of the term, because they adhere to a metaphysical dogma in the teeth of contrary scientific evidence. If design is a legitimate subject for scientific investigation in the case of computers, communications from space aliens, and peculiar markings on cave walls, why should it be arbitrarily excluded from consideration when dealing with the biological cell or the conscious mind? Whether the evidence actually does support design hypotheses in biology is a point in dispute, of course, but in our opinion the scientific materialists effectively concede the point when they adamantly refuse to admit a distinction between "materialism" and "science." They must realize at some level that they cannot win the argument on the basis of evidence, and therefore must win it by imposing a definition of science that disqualifies their critics regardless of the evidence.


Two Examples from the National Academy of Sciences


The policy of supporting Darwinism and materialism leads science educators to present the subject in a manner that actively discourages students from cultivating the critical thinking skills that are essential in real scientific research. Students are also never prepared to understand public controversies over subjects like social Darwinism and genetic determinism because the educators present a whitewashed version of their theory. I'll give two illustrations, both involving the National Academy's Guidebook. I choose this particular text as an example because it is simple, recent, and has the official imprimatur of the nation's most prestigious scientific organization. Similar confusions abound in the literature of evolution at every level.

On page 19, the Guidebook describes one of the most frequently cited examples of natural selection in a section titled "Ongoing Evolution Among Darwin's Finches." Here is the complete text:

A particularly interesting example of contemporary evolution involves the 13 species of finches studied by Darwin on the Galapagos Islands, now known as Darwin's finches. A research group led by Peter and Rosemary Grant of Princeton University has shown that a single year of drought on the islands can drive evolutionary changes in the finches. Drought diminishes supplies of easily cracked nuts but permits the survival of plants that produce larger, tougher nuts. Drought thus favors birds with strong, wide beaks that can break these tougher seeds, producing populations of birds with these traits. The Grants have estimated that if droughts occur about once every 10 years on the islands, a new species of finch might arise in only about 200 years.


A good science teacher might employ humor to illustrate the fallacy of extrapolation here. "If the average length of finch beaks in a population increases 5 percent following drought years, and droughts occur every ten years, how long will it take the beaks to grow from an average of one inch in length to ten feet, or for finches to become eagles?" It is no wonder that the Guidebook's authors did not quote the title of the Grant's 1987 paper in Nature, "Oscillating Selection in Darwin's Finches," because that would have signaled to teachers, and perhaps also to bright students, that the finch beak example involves no continuing directional change at all. The drought year in question was followed a few years later by floods, and the average beak size promptly went back to normal. But even if finches did grow steadily larger for a time, would this show that they can change into something completely different?

This example is not taken out of context, nor is it atypical. It follows the thesis of The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner, a book that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 and has been enthusiastically recommended to the public by leading authorities, including the president of the National Academy of Sciences. It is easy to see why the Darwinists feel they have to present evidence in a selective and slanted manner. Under any kind of objective analysis, it would become apparent that the Darwinists have never discovered a mechanism capable of creating new complex organs or changing one kind of body plan into another. (The finch beak example is given top billing in the textbooks precisely because the other known examples of observed natural selection are even less impressive.) The Darwinist educators are determined to persuade rather than to educate, and so their textbooks have to bluff.

If a stock promoter drafted a prospectus the way the Guidebook presents the finch beak story, by padding assets and concealing liabilities, purchasers would be entitled to recover damages for fraud and the promoter might go to jail. Yet scientific materialists do not consider such presentations to be dishonest for the same reason that they do not consider it dishonest to omit from the high school textbooks (as they do) any mention of the sudden and mysterious appearance of the animal phyla in the Cambrian explosion (see chapter 11). Specific evidentiary problems can't be all that serious, they reason, since some materialist process has to have done all the creating regardless of the evidence. If the mechanism that produced the Cambrian explosion is not yet fully understood, this is a problem for advanced researchers. Students can't be taught everything at once, and to avoid encouraging them in unsound ways of thinking it is best not to make them aware of the kind of evidence that causes people to form doubts.

I could give many other examples of how Darwinian educational materials present scientific evidence selectively or misleadingly, but for my second example I would rather discuss an important sin of omission. Readers today are virtually assaulted with books by eminent scientific authorities presenting a materialist and determinist worldview in the name of science. The Harvard zoologist Edward Wilson's 1998 book Consilience argues that not only scientists but also theologians and literary scholars should base their work strictly on Darwinian assumptions. Philosopher Daniel Dennett describes Darwin's theory as a "universal acid; it eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world view." (The view that God is a valid source of moral standards is one of those traditional concepts that Darwin's theory eats through, notwithstanding the vague reassurances science educators provide for religious parents.)

Influential evolutionary psychologists like Steven Pinker and Robert Wright describe human behavior as the product of genetic programs honed by natural selection, while eminent evolutionists of the political left, such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, describe evolutionary psychology as a pseudoscience honed by prejudice. Molecular geneticists propose projects to alter the human genome, at first to eliminate specific genetic defects and then eventually to improve the species overall. They see no reason to respect the existing design of an organism that was produced by unintelligent mechanisms that could hardly be expected to do the job right.

Behind all the specific controversies lies one important question that the educators systematically evade: Are evolutionary and materialist assumptions merely a convention of scientific investigation, or are they valid for all purposes? When science educators are trying to justify excluding nonmaterialistic thoughts from the science curriculum, they tend to portray science as merely "one way of knowing," with the implication that other ways of knowing are equally valid. When you press them to specify which other ways of knowing are as valid as science, they can't think of any examples. It turns out that what they really mean is that science is the only way of knowing, and outside of science there are only subjective beliefs and feelings. A typical comment is that one can "feel" a sense of awe or beauty towards some object like the rainbow, even though we know through scientific investigation how the color spectrum is produced. Religious "faith," aesthetic "feelings," and moral "beliefs" are continually contrasted with scientific "knowledge," a division that assumes that only science provides truths that are valid for everybody.

For those who think that science is the only path to knowledge, and there are many such in the National Academy, it is important to extend the realm of science as far as possible to avoid a complete relativism on all subjects involving any question of value. This explains why pseudoscientific fads such as behaviorism, Freudianism, Marxism, and social Darwinism tend to gain so much influence, and to reappear in new guises every time they are discredited. It also explains why thinkers who don't claim scientific authority tend to teach that all knowledge is relative to particular interpretive communities. When only science is deemed capable of creating knowledge, ambitious worldview-proclaimers will either style themselves as scientists, or say that their nihilism is itself an inevitable consequence of scientific knowledge. Is it true that science is the only way of gaining objective knowledge, and that outside of science there is only subjective faith and belief? That is the message the National Academy apparently wishes to convey, but it does so by persistent insinuation rather than explicit statement in order to maintain the pose of neutrality towards "religious belief."


The Right Question


In short, our scientific leadership is in a philosophical muddle and is only making things worse with its campaign of intimidation, factual misrepresentation, and semantic legerdemain. To put things on a more rational basis, the first thing that has to be done is to get the Bible out of the discussion. Too many people, including journalists, have seen the movie Inherit the Wind and have become convinced that everyone who questions Darwinism must want to remove the microscopes and textbooks from the biology classrooms and just read the book of Genesis to the students. It is vital not to give any encouragement to this prejudice, and to keep the discussion strictly on the scientific evidence and the philosophical assumptions. This is not to say that the biblical issues are unimportant; the point is rather that the time to address them will be after we have separated materialist prejudice from scientific fact.

The question for now is not whether the vast claims of Darwinian evolution conflict with Genesis, but whether they conflict with the evidence of biology. To make that question visible, it is necessary to distinguish between the dictates of materialist philosophy and the inferences that one might legitimately draw from the evidence in the absence of a materialist bias. So I put this simple question to the Darwinian establishment: What should we do if empirical evidence and materialist philosophy are going in different directions? Suppose, for example, that the evidence suggests that intelligent causes were involved in biological creation. Should we follow the evidence or the philosophy?

Scientific materialists find that question impossible to answer, or even to comprehend, because they identify materialism not only with science but also with rationality itself. In their minds the only alternative to materialism is a chaotic animism in which science is impossible because all events occur at the whim of capricious spirits, a world in which every question about causation can be answered with a shrug and the remark "it must be the will of God." This is nonsense, of course. The very idea of natural laws stems from the concept that the world is ruled by a rational lawgiver, just as it is a historical fact that modern science grew out of a worldview guided by biblical theism. One of the absurdities of materialism is that it assumes that the world can be rationally comprehensible only if it is entirely the product of irrational, unguided mechanisms. Another absurdity is that the scientific mind itself was designed by natural selection, a force that rewards only superiority at reproduction and by whose standards the mind of the cockroach is every bit as effective as the mind of Einstein. On the contrary, the rationality and reliability of the scientific mind rests on the fact that the mind was designed in the image of the mind of the Creator, who made both the laws and our capacity to understand them.

Diehard materialists will never agree that there can be a contradiction between the findings of empirical science and the dictates of materialist philosophy, but more open-minded thinkers will grasp the possibility at once. To get the necessary reconsideration going, the first priority for critics of scientific materialism is to state the critique of materialism and naturalism in language that the intellectual community can recognize as legitimate. In the world of the university it is not legitimate to set up the Bible as an authority against the evidence of scientific observation, but it is very legitimate to show that people who claim to be basing their ideology on observation or neutral reasoning are actually proceeding on the basis of powerful hidden assumptions. It is also legitimate to show that a specific scientific observation -- such as the finch beak example -- appears to be evidence that natural selection has creative power only if you interpret the evidence with a powerful materialist bias.


The Strategy

This is where the ID movement's strategy comes in. To get the intellectual world discussing a new and possibly unwelcome question, it is not enough just to write a book or make an argument. We have to inspire a lot of people to start doing intellectual work based on the right questions, work of such high quality and persuasive force that the world cannot avoid discussing it. These thinkers have to produce books and articles that explore in detail what happens when you call materialism into question rather than take it for granted. As the discussion proceeds, the intellectual world will become gradually accustomed to treating materialism and naturalism as subjects to be analyzed and debated, rather than as tacit foundational assumptions that can never be criticized. Eventually the answer to our prime question will become too obvious to be in doubt. When the philosophy conflicts with the evidence, real scientists follow the evidence. It will be equally obvious that thinkers outside of science should not allow scientists to abuse their proper authority by forcing dubious philosophical assumptions on the rest of the world. The answers will take care of themselves once the discussion is directed to the right questions.

The metaphor of a wedge portrays the modernist scientific and intellectual world, with its materialist assumptions, as a thick and seemingly impenetrable log. Such a log can be split wide open, however, if you can find a crack and pound the sharp edge of a wedge into it. There are a number of inviting cracks in modernism, but probably the most important one involves the huge gap between the materialist and empiricist definitions of science. My own writing and speaking represents the sharp edge of this wedge. I make the first penetration, seeking always only to legitimate a line of inquiry rather than to win a debate, measuring success by the number of significant thinkers I draw into the discussion, rather than by the conclusions that they draw for the present.

There are some very gifted people following me into the gradually widening opening, taking the discussion to levels I could never reach by myself. The first and most famous example is Michael Behe. I explained in layman's terms why the Darwinian mechanism can't do what it has to do, and Behe explained in scientific terms exactly what that means when you understand how biology operates at the molecular level. Behe's book Darwin's Black Box' has sold a lot of copies and received a lot of reviews. The reviewers say what I knew they would say: Behe's scientific description is accurate, but his thesis is unacceptable because it points to a conclusion that materialists are determined to avoid. Of course, the reviewers tend to be philosophically naive souls who mix up the two models in their minds. They think that sticking to the evidence means sticking to materialism regardless of the evidence. That kind of logic may satisfy those who are highly prejudiced in favor of materialism, but it will not work with those who are inclined to doubt.


Two Key Terms

Darwinism: Living things originate through descent with modification (descent means descent from one or a few primitive ancestral forms; modification means natural selection of random variations)

Neo-Darwinism: Same as above, but with the process of modification cast in genetic terms (genetic mutations are the source of variations, and natural selection produces changes in gene frequencies).

After Behe comes William Dembski, with his remorselessly rigorous The Design Inference. Dembski's philosophical and mathematical reasoning is highly sophisticated, but his fundamental proposition, that intelligent causes can do things that unintelligent causes cannot do, and scientific investigation can tell the difference, is pure common sense. I attended a seminar on Dembski's ideas recently at a major university's philosophy department, where I saw from the reactions how common it is for clever people to deploy their mental agility in the service of obscurity. But Dembski put the concept of intelligent design on their mental maps, and eventually they will get used to it.

After Dembski come a lot more. My sense is that the battle against the Darwinian mechanism has already been won at the intellectual level, although not at the political level. When I debate Darwinists, they rarely try to defend examples like finch beak variation as showing a mechanism that can really create complex genetic information or the sort of molecular mechanisms that Behe's book describes. Instead, they shift the burden of proof to the skeptics, arguing that the mere fact that we don't have a satisfactory mechanism now doesn't necessarily mean that one will not be discovered at some time 1'n the future. (For reasons previously explained, scientific materialists consider the promise of a materialist mechanism in the future to be equivalent to the demonstration of a mechanism in the present. If the whole system is as true as arithmetic, the missing mechanism will inevitably be discovered.) When they are on the defensive, Darwinists frequently dismiss the mechanism as a mere detail, insisting that all scientists are agreed that "evolution is a fact," even though they may disagree about exactly how it occurred. Evolution without a specific mechanism is too vague to be testable. The theory claims, for example, that an ancestral bacterium produced distant descendants as diverse as the worm and the lobster. How can one test such an ambitious claim if no details of the transformation are specified?

When the claim that large-scale evolutionary changes occur is made specific, then it becomes testable. So far the claim is failing the tests. Writers Paul Nelson and Jonathan Wells have shown this (see chapters 9 and 10) by describing the dissimilarity of supposed evolutionary cousins at the earlier embryonic stages, and by reviewing the literature describing attempts by biologists to change the direction of embryonic development by inducing mutations in the DNA. What the results show is that mutations either have no effect on the developing embryo or they have a damaging effect, leading to death or birth defects unless the developmental repair mechanisms can fix the damage. What mutations never do is to change the direction of development, as would have to happen if evolutionary transformation were to occur. To put it simply, you may believe on philosophical grounds that large-scale evolutionary transformations must have occurred, but this belief finds no support in the experimental evidence. If they did occur, no one knows how.

The Future

Persons who consider only the cultural power of evolutionary naturalism and see how thoroughly it dominates the contemporary mind may suppose that our critique of scientific materialism is a quixotic venture that can never succeed. On the contrary, I think our success is all but inevitable. In arguing that we should distinguish between objective empirical testing on the one hand and deductive reasoning from materialist philosophical assumptions on the other, we are making a point of elementary logic that is irresistible once it is understood. The only obstacle to a breakthrough is the longstanding prejudice, so deeply ingrained in educational practice, which says that materialism and science are the same thing, and that there cannot be evidence of design in biology because materialist prejudice forbids it. A prejudice like that can be protected for a while, but in the end reason always breaks through.
I measure our success in two ways. First, many thousands of high school and college students are reading our literature, and are responding very favorably. As they learn that the official textbooks present the evidence selectively, and even distort it in the manner illustrated by the finch beak example, many become highly motivated to challenge the dogmatic system that is being foisted on them. The most talented of these will be the leaders of the movement in the future. Second, the Darwinists are completely unable to meet our challenge at the intellectual level, and scarcely try. Their literature continues to promote the view that the only dissenters from Darwinism are religious fundamentalists who don't know about the overwhelming evidence that proves that "evolution has occurred." This caricature of the opposition works only with people who have never heard the dissenting arguments firsthand. With the growth of private schooling (including home schooling) and the Internet, it is no longer as easy as it was for educators to ensure that students hear only the official version of the story. Once independent-thinking young people have read the dissenting literature, they are not likely to be impressed with the evasive statements of the Darwinist establishment.

Success for our movement does not mean replacing one dogmatic system with another. Our objective is not to impose a solution, but to open the most important areas of intellectual inquiry to fresh thinking. If the fall of Darwinism inspires materialists to develop a new theory that can survive unbiased scientific testing, then so be it. If they can't do that, then the world will face the astonishing truth that the evidence of biology actually supports the popular belief that living organisms are the product of an intelligent creator, rather than a blind material force. When that realization sinks in, the next big project on the intellectual agenda will be to understand why so many brilliant people fooled themselves so completely for so long. Exploring that question will make the twenty-first century a very exciting time.

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The Peppered Moth Story

The National Academy's Guidebook ignores the standard textbook example of evolution by natural selection, the peppered moths of the English midland forests. This moth population was predominantly light-colored in the early nineteenth century, and then became predominantly dark during the late nineteenth century. According to the textbook story, the moths rest during the day on tree trunks and are eaten there by birds. While the tree trunks were light-colored the light moths were better camouflaged, but the dark moths had the advantage after the trunks became dark due to the effects of industrial pollution. The light moths made a comeback after the advent of air pollution control laws in the 1950s.

Even taken at face value, the moth story (like the finch beak story) involves no innovation or directional change. Discoveries in the 1980s showed, moreover, that the moths do not normally rest on tree trunks. All textbook photographs of peppered moths on tree trunks were produced either by manually positioning live moths (which are torpid during the day) or by gluing dead moths to tree trunks. The textbook story is now thoroughly discredited, and its continued use shows how desperate Darwinists are to provide confirmation for their cherished theory.
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I hope you found that article as interesting as I did. Some of the people that Phillip Johnson refers to in the article have written some fascinating, short articles:

Based on recent discoveries in biochemistry, Michael Behe shows why irreducibly complex structures cannot be accounted for by evolution.

http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_idfrombiochemistry.htm

A short one on the fossil record: http://www.arn.org/idfaq/Doesn%27t%20the%20fossil%20evidence%20support%20naturalistic%20evolution.htm

And finally, an excerpt from an article on the Urey-Miller experiment and the origin of organic molecules:

During the 1920s and 1930s a more sophisticated version of this so-called "chemical evolutionary theory" was proposed by a Russian biochemist named Alexander I. Oparin. Oparin had a much more accurate understanding than his predecessors of the complexity of cellular metabolism, but neither he nor any one else at the time fully appreciated the complexity of the molecules such as protein and DNA that make life possible. Oparin, like his nineteenth-century predecessors, suggested that life could have first evolved as the result of a series of chemical reactions. Unlike his predecessors, however, he envisioned that this process of chemical evolution would involve many more chemical transformations and reactions and many hundreds of millions (or even billions) of years.

The first experimental support for Oparin’s hypothesis came in December 1952. While doing graduate work under Harold Urey at the University of Chicago, Stanley Miller circulated a gaseous mixture of methane, ammonia, water vapor, and hydrogen through a glass vessel containing an electrical discharge chamber. Miller sent a high voltage charge of electricity into the chamber via tungsten filaments in an attempt to simulate the effects of ultraviolet light on prebiotic atmospheric gases. After two days, Miller found a small (2 percent) yield of amino acids in the U-shaped water trap he used to collect reaction products at the bottom of the vessel.

Miller’s success in producing biologically relevant "building blocks" under ostensibly prebiotic conditions was heralded as a great breakthrough. His experiment seemed to provide experimental support for Oparin’s chemical evolutionary theory by showing that an important step in Oparin’s scenario-the production of biological building blocks from simpler atmospheric gases-was possible on the early earth. Miller’s experimental results gave Oparin’s model the status of textbook orthodoxy almost overnight. Thanks largely to Miller, chemical evolution is now routinely presented in both high school and college biology textbooks as the accepted scientific explanation for the origin of life.

Yet as we shall see, chemical evolutionary theory is now known to be riddled with difficulties; and Miller’s work is understood by the origin-of-life research community itself to have little if any relevance to explaining how amino acids-let alone proteins or living cells-actually could have arisen on the early earth.

When Miller conducted his experiment, he presupposed that the earth’s atmosphere was composed of a mixture of what chemists call "reducing gases" such as methane, ammonia, and hydrogen. He also assumed that the earth’s atmosphere contained virtually no free oxygen. In the years following Miller’s experiment, however, new geochemical evidence made it clear that the assumptions that Oparin and Miller had made about the early atmosphere could not be justified.

Instead, evidence strongly suggested that neutral gases-not methane, ammonia, and hydrogen-predominated in the early atmosphere. Moreover, a number of geochemical studies showed that significant amounts of free oxygen were also present even before the advent of plant life, probably as the result of volcanic outgassing and the photodissociation of water vapor. In a chemically neutral atmosphere, reactions among atmospheric gases will not readily take place. Moreover, even a small amount of atmospheric oxygen will quench the production of biological building blocks and cause any biomolecules otherwise present to degrade rapidly.

As had been well known even before Miller’s experiment, amino acids will form readily in an appropriate mixture of reducing gases. What made Miller’s experiment significant was not the production of amino acids per se, but their production from ostensibly plausible prebiotic conditions. As Miller himself stated, "In this apparatus an attempt was made to duplicate a primitive atmosphere of the earth, and not to obtain the optimum conditions for the formation of amino acids." Now, however, the only reason to continue assuming the existence of a chemically reducing, prebiotic atmosphere is that chemical evolutionary theory requires it.

Ironically, even if we assume for the moment that the reducing gases used by Stanley Miller do actually simulate conditions on the early earth, his experiments inadvertently demonstrated the necessity of intelligent agency. Even successful simulation experiments require the intervention of the experimenters to prevent what are known as "interfering cross reactions" and other chemically destructive processes. Without human intervention, experiments like that performed by Miller invariably produce nonbiological substances that degrade amino acids into nonbiologically relevant compounds.

Experimenters prevent this by removing chemical products that induce undesirable cross reactions. They employ other "unnatural" interventions as well. Simulation experimenters have typically used only short wavelength light, rather than both short and long wavelength ultraviolet light, which would be present in any realistic atmosphere. Why? The presence of the long wavelength UV light quickly degrades amino acids.

Such manipulations constitute what chemist Michael Polanyi called a "profoundly informative intervention." They seem to "simulate," if anything, the need for an intelligent agent to overcome the randomizing influences of natural chemical processes.

Yet a more fundamental problem remains for all chemical evolutionary scenarios. Even if it could be demonstrated that the building blocks of essential molecules could arise in realistic prebiotic conditions, the problem of assembling those building blocks into functioning proteins or DNA chains would remain.

To form a protein, amino acids must link together to form a chain. Yet amino acids form functioning proteins only when they adopt very specific sequential arrangements, rather like properly sequenced letters in an English sentence. Thus, amino acids alone do not make proteins, any more than letters alone make words, sentences, or poetry. In both cases, the sequencing of the constituent parts determines the function (or lack of function) of the whole. Explaining the origin of the specific sequencing of proteins (and DNA) lies at the heart of the current crisis in materialistic evolutionary thinking.

A link to the entire article: http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0004/articles/meyer.html

Here it is, the whole thing. For those just tuning in, this is the outline to my sex spomedy [speech + comedy]. It's a pretty good explanation of sex, love and chastity. Plus it talks about porn and modesty, and answers some common questions. I don't claim this as something I came up with on my own -- most of it was compiled from many sources -- which is why I can confidently say: This will help you in relationships. Feel free to leave me a comment or question:

What is chastity?

Chastity is saving your sexuality for the person you will spend your life with, in order to have more peace and joy now and to have a stronger, lasting relationship in the future. If love is living for someone else, then chastity is living for someone else before you've met that person.

Chastity is not abstinence, because abstinence involves not doing something that is inherently bad [like heroin]. Chastity is a positive outlook which says that sex is good in the right context. Chastity is not virginity. Virginity is a term that describes your past. Why let our past determine our present decisions? It is always possible to start again. Chastity is a current lifestyle, a decision made in the present. Chastity is not celibacy: celibacy means never getting married.

What do you want out of life?

Most of us want to spend our lives with someone we truly love. However, those relationships rarely happen by chance. Chastity will help to give you a deeper, stronger relationship with your lifetime partner. It will help you to avoid divorce. [note: the words marriage and "lifetime commitment" will be used interchangeably, so go with whatever you feel more comfortable with] At the same time, chastity will help you to have more happiness, peace and joy right now.

Every great thing in life requires sacrifice. We sacrifice four years of our lives in order to learn, get a college degree, and open up opportunities. [For those of you who aren't in college, think of another major sacrifice you've made.] A lasting marriage is a great thing which also requires sacrifice. Chastity will help build a foundation of sacrifice for your marriage.

So, what does chastity have to do with this? How can chastity help me to have a stronger, better relationship in the future? How can chastity help me to have more peace, joy and happiness now? How can chastity help me to avoid divorce and spend my life with someone I truly love? Below are five reasons why chastity will help our future relationships, and five reasons why chastity will help us now.

Society has presented you a view of sex which doesn't work. It's probably one of the only views of sex you've heard. Here's another view. I'm not telling you what to think. You must make your own decisions in life. However, the best decisions are informed decisions. Many of you don't know what chastity is, or why people live it. Many of you haven't heard a decent argument for it. Now is your chance.

When thinking about the following reasons, think about a few things: What will make me happy? What are my goals? How will I achieve them? And finally, think about your future spouse: Is he/she worth this sacrifice?

1. Chastity maintains bonding power of sex.

One benefit of chastity is that it allows you to bond with your spouse in a unique and powerful way. When someone has sex, a chemical called oxytocin is released in the brain which helps to "bond" two people together. When people break up, and the bond is broken, the chemical loses its effectiveness.

As someone has sex with someone, then breaks up, then has sex with someone, then breaks up, then...the bond loses its effectiveness. Chastity maintains the bonding power and saves it for one’s lifetime partner, thereby strengthening that relationship and helping it to last.

2. Chastity might help one see if they truly love someone and vice versa.

Many ask: What if I'm in love? And I always respond: are you just "in love" or do you truly love that person? We all know people who have been "in love" with someone, and subsequently broken up. Being "in love" is a powerful emotional attachment to someone. However, it's temporary. The difference between being "in love" and true love is that true love demands permanence. True love wants to spend forever with its beloved. True love is "A deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit." I think it also involves a deep sense of responsibility for your beloved. True love is living for someone else.

So, how do you know if you truly love someone? One way to know is if you place the other person's well being above your own selfish desires. Let us say, for example, that your girlfriend asks you for a drink of water. And you go into the kitchen and there are 100 glasses of water, but one of them has poison in it. Do you let your girlfriend go thirsty or do you risk giving her poisoned water? Of course you should let her go thirsty. And so by the same token if there is the slightest notion that premarital sex would be bad for your partner [physical or emotional, either now or in the future], true love would not even take the risk of hurting its beloved.

Another way to help evaluate if you truly love someone: Take this test and read the information following it: http://www.pureloveclub.com/chastity/index.php?id=7&entryid=22

Finally, having sex with someone influences the way you view the relationship. A sexual relationship can cause someone to overlook necessary factors to a strong relationship. Chastity allows you to see that person and the relationship more clearly. [And if you're one of those people who complain about never meeting any quality people, chastity is one of the best ways to avoid selfish, immature people. If someone doesn't respect your view of sex, they don't respect you. You deserve better.]

3. Chastity builds a foundation of sacrifice.

There are many ways we can tell someone we love him/her, but the only way we can show it is through sacrifice. [Note: It is possible to sacrifice for someone without loving the person, or even to sacrifice with bad intentions.] We can tell someone we love him/her, but the only way for someone to see it is through sacrifice. Maybe it's doing the dishes, or making the effort to buy a gift, or giving up time to help him/her. All great relationships are built on sacrifice. Chastity is a wonderful sacrifice. It says: "I will sacrifice because I respect you and your values, and I want you and your future spouse to have the best possible relationship." At the same time, you are saying "I love you" to your own future spouse. Love is, at its core, unselfish. Selfishness kills love, while selflessness [sacrifice] makes love stronger. [Don't we all want to make love stronger?] Chastity builds a powerful foundation of sacrifice and love for current and future relationships.

4. Chastity adds greater meaning to the act of sex:

If you place a high value on your sexuality, then the act of sex will have greater meaning. Let's say there are three people, Ralph, Allen and James. Ralph's only requirement for sex is whether or not he is attracted to the gal. The meaning of his act of sex is: "You are attractive, and so I share with you what I would share with any other attractive female." Allen will only share his sexuality with someone with whom he is "in love" with. His act of sex says, "I share this intimate part of myself with you because I think I am in love. Of course, I may stop being "in love" with you and fall "in love" with someone else, at which point I'll do the same thing with them." James on the other hand, will only share part of his sexuality with someone who: a) he truly loves, b) has made an active choice to save her sexuality for her husband and c) who has made a public committment to spend her entire life with him. [and vice versa] When James has sex with his wife, he says: "I give myself entirely to you for the rest of my life." Whose sex has greater meaning?

5. Greater self control and the ability to say no.

Saying no to temptation increases self control. If you can't say no to temptations before marriage, how will you say no to them during marriage?

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How will chastity help us to have a better, happier life now?

1. Less heartache.

We will all experience heartache, but chaste people experience less heartache. By reserving the intimacy of sex for your lifetime partner, you will protect your heart.

2. Peace of mind and freedom from hypocrisy:

When I was younger, my brother sat me down and said: "Christopher, one day you will meet a beautiful woman. And you will love her and she will love you and you will ask her to marry you, and she'll say yes. And you'll live together for the rest of your lives." I smiled and nodded. He continued, "But in the mean time, you will be dating other people, and she will be dating other people." I leaned forward. "How do you want those men who go out with your future spouse, how do you want them to treat her?" I thought about it for a moment. He continued, "With the same amount of honor and respect that you want those men to treat your wife, that's how you should treat every woman you meet." He makes a good point: Every person we date is someone's brother, son or future husband, someones sister, daughter or future wife? How do you want someone to treat your future husband? How do you want someone to treat your daughter?

A few years ago, there was a man in Arizona who was sleeping one night when his dog started barking. He got up and went outside to see what the dog was barking at. It turns out the dog was barking at a bush. The man scolded the dog and went back to bed. By the time the man had made it back to bed, the dog had started barking again. He went outside, but this time, he picked up a stick and started to beat his dog into submission. The dog quieted and the man went inside. A few minutes later, the dog started barking again. The man was really upset now. He grabbed a gun and shot the dog dead, then went back to sleep. The robber crept out from behind the bush, stepped over the dead dog and broke into the house. He killed the man in his sleep and robbed him of everything he had.

The barking dog is our conscience. A lot of us try to fight our conscience. We say, shhhh quiet down. Don't remind me that I'm doing something wrong. Don't remind me that I'm doing something I wouldn't want my future husband or wife to know about. Dont remind me.... and so we quiet our conscience. The only way to have peace of mind is to listen to our conscience.

3. Chastity is fun and exciting.

You might be wondering where's my freedom and excitment? And I say, chastity is fun and exciting right now. When you are chaste, even holding hands is exciting. And even the most gentle kiss on the cheek can make your heart race. Also, you can have romance without regret. Finally, you don't have to worry about questions like: What is that red bump on my crotch? Am I pregnant? Those questions are not fun or exciting.

4. Chastity means STD free!

Now, as you all know, there is only one method of contraception which reduces the transmission of STD's: CONDOMS. But how effective are condoms, really? On the back of some of the boxes, they say they are 99.7% effective. But that's in lab tests. And I dont know anyone who has had sex in a lab.

The reality is that, with typical use, condoms are only 87% effective in preventing pregnancy, and preventing the transmission of AIDS and some STDs. Is sex worth that risk? Now, with perfect use, condoms are more effective [95-97%] at preventing AIDS and pregnancy, but 3-5% is still a huge risk. If you were going skydiving, and they said "Hey, our parachutes work 97% of the time," would you jump?

More importantly, CONDOMS DON'T PROTECT AGAINST SOME STDs. Human Papilloma Virus, HPV, is the number one cause of cervical cancer. HPV currently causes more deaths than AIDS in the United states. 20 million people have it, and 5.5 million people will get it every year. 80% of women will get it in their lifetime. Doctors cannot test for the virus, they can only look for symptoms. There are 30 strains of the virus, and some of them have no symptoms, meaning there is no way to test for it. Symptoms might include genital warts, abnormal pap smears, cervical cancer, or nothing. They've done several studies and most show condoms have no protective effect. Granted, there are still more studies to be done, but the evidence right now shows little or no protective effects. This information is from the Centers for Disease Control. Go to their website, read their recommendations, and find out more:

http://www.cdc.gov/std/HPV/STDFact-HPV.htm#reducerisk

More on STDs from the CDC:

STDs list and FAQs:

http://www.cdc.gov/std/healthcomm/fact_sheets.htm

Herpes:

http://www.cdc.gov/std/Herpes/STDFact-Herpes.htm#prevent

Condom effectiveness:

http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/pubs/facts/condoms.htm

What about oral sex?

STDs thrive on soft, mucousy surfaces, and therefore can be spread through oral sex. Anything that can be contracted through vaginal intercourse can also be contracted through oral and anal sex. But there's better reason not to have oral sex: If you need to put your genitals in your girlfriend's mouth in order to show her how much she means to you, maybe that's how much she means to you.

5. Greater self control and peace of mind.

If love involves giving of self, one must be in control of self in order to give one’s self. Chastity gives greater self control.

 

How far is too far? This is fundamentally the wrong question. Instead, you should be asking: "How far can I go to protect, honor and respect my date?" But if you need a rule of thumb: someone is probably out on a date with your future spouse. How far is too far for him or her?

To Women: You've been told by the media and perhaps by your parents that in order to be beautiful, you must be unnaturally skinny, with a disproportionate body, and wear skimpy clothing. Those are all lies.

You must decide for yourself what you're going to wear. I can only provide some benefits of being modest. Some reasons why women might choose to be modest:

1. Modesty maintains the feminine mystery. I knew a few girls whose midrift I never saw, and I thought it was amazing. A girl could get attention by walking around wearing saran wrap, but after an hour the excitement will be gone. The excitement of modesty lasts.

2. Modesty says something about you. Modesty says, "My body is so valuable and amazing that only one person is worthy of seeing it." Modesty does not show off to passerbys. Revealing clothing, on the other hand, calls attention to certain body parts. While modesty says, "There's more to me than my body," clothing that emphasizes certain body parts screams out "Hey! Look at this [body part]."

3. With modest clothing, you are more likely to attract guys who are interested in you than your body. Certainly, you will attract men who are more interested in your body than you no matter what you wear. But modest clothing is more likely to attract better guys.

4. Immodest clothing helps to bring out lust in a man. Lust is a selfish desire for pleasure, and because it is selfish, it opposes love, which is unselfish. So why help to bring out lust? Let's keep in mind, though, that men are responsible for their own decisions and actions, regardless of what women wear.

To Men: In order to be able to fully love, we have to get rid of pornography and masturbation. Here's why:

Pornography: The problem with pornography is not that it shows too much, but that it shows too little. Instead of showing a woman's intelligence, kindness, and personality, it reduces her to a sexual object. Pornography teaches men that women are objects to be used for pleasure, then discarded at will. Pornography creates a fantasy world that will put a strain on real life relationships. More importantly, pornography fosters lust -- a selfish desire for sexual pleasure. Lust will always prevent a man from truly loving someone, because lust is selfish while true love in unselfish. Lastly, pornography is being unfaithful with your mind and eyes, when you should be saving yourself entirely for your future spouse.  So to the degree that you love women, fight pornography.

Masturbation: Masturbation is basically having sex with yourself. It takes the "we" of sex and turns it into "me." Again, this selfish view of sex will keep you from true love.

What about repression? Contrary to popular belief, you won't die from not having sex. In fact, you will experience life in a way you probably have never felt before. If you are looking at porn and jacking off, you will be repressed. Why? Because you'll be thinking about sex all the time. Giving in doesn't last very long; the craving will come back stronger. If you stop looking at porn and don't jack off, you will eventually think about sex much less. This is a tough battle that we as men all face, myself included [women experience this too, but in a different way.] But this a problem that all men can overcome. We can overcome lust, and be able to love more fully. Try it. You've got nothing to lose and everything to gain.

The first three weeks are tough, but it gets easier. In a short while, you will not think about sex as much. Instead of feeling repressed, you'll feel free. Yes, I used to look at porn when I was younger. But, I gave it up. I now feel much more peace of mind. I feel free from the almost overwhelming burden of thinking about sex a lot. It's almost as if I've got more space in my head. And more importantly, I'm able to view women like a little boy would -- I can view women with purity. I can think of woman, and be attracted to her, without having to think about her sexually. I am able to look at women unselfishly. And I think that is beautiful.

To everyone:

Your value does not depend on your weight, your intelligence or you physical attractiveness. You are inherently valuable. You deserve someone who will dedicate his/her life to you before you share your sexuality with that person.

Here are some ways to help live out chastity:

1. Avoid being alone. Don't go to people's rooms alone or "hang out" in the car. If you're really trying to be chaste, why put yourself at unnecessary risk?

2. Refrain from making out and "petting." Chastity is about saving your sexuality for your future spouse, not just the act of sex. So, if making out and "petting" are sexual [which I think they are], then part of being chaste is saving it for your life partner. But besides that: making out and "petting" get the body ready for sex. More temptation we don't need.

3. Don't get horizontal: Don't lay down with someone, in a bed or anywhere else.

4. Perhaps most importantly: Alcohol impairs your judgment. Don't get drunk. Unless you're in a really safe situation, like with family.

For those of us who are gay: what I've said applies to gay as well as straight. If a gay person wanted to show respect for his or her life partner, he/she would be chaste.

For those of us who have already had sex: It's never too late to start anew. Your future spouse is out there, waiting for you! I know what's been said may have hurt some of us. If you feel pain, embrace it! Sometimes it takes pain in order to heal. Some of the coolest people I know have made mistakes in the past, but at some point in their lives they started over. We all can start over.

If people make fun of you: Remember what they say. On your wedding day, you will only hear silence, because all those people who had made fun of you would give anything to be in your shoes.

If you still decide against chastity, ask yourself why: Are all ten reasons faulty? Am I afraid of what others would think? Am I afraid of change? Am I unwilling to make this effort?

If I could leave you with one thought, it is this: The joy of chastity is greater than all the pleasure in the world.

Frequently asked questions:

What if I practice chastity, then I get a divorce?

Let's say you want to be a doctor. You study for weeks for the MCATs, take all the requisite classes, volunteer, get internships, get recommendations and then apply to 20 med schools. What happens if you don't get in? Should you have never made any effort in the first place? Even though you might not succeed, you should still try your best to make your dreams happen. If your goal is to spend your life with someone you love, then you should try your best to make it happen, even if it's possible you might fail. [However, chastity makes it much more unlikely.] You can't give up on your dreams because it's possible you might not succeed.

Are there any studies about chaste couples?

Well, there really aren't that many direct studies about chastity. However, they have studied couples who live together before marriage, and they have an outrageously high divorce rate [somewhere between 75-90%].

Why do I need to get married? I hate marriage. Why not just have a promise between me and my partner?

True love demands permanence. If you don't want to spend your life with your guy, you're just not that into him. And if he doesn't want to spend his life with you, he doesn't truly love you. If you really love someone, you will want to be with that person forever. If you've met the most amazing person of your life, why haven't you told all your friends and family? If you've met the person you want to spend your life with, why not have a big celebration with people you care about? If you've found the person you're going to spend your life with -- the best thing to happen to you since birth -- you will want to have a celebration, and you will want to tell everyone you know. You can call it marriage, or call it a commitment ceremony, or whatever.

Who else is doin this chastity deal?

A lot of young people are choosing to wait. More than half of American teens graduate from high school as virgins. Overall, more people are choosing to wait. Here's the AP article:

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20041210/D86SUBAO0.html

For the girls who don't think that guys are choosing to wait, read the above article. More guys age 18-19 are virgins than girls!

At UCLA, more than 50% of undergrads under 21 have not had vaginal intercourse. Now, that doesn't mean they're living chastity, but it does show an overall trend. Chastity is gaining popularity.

What if we're not sexually compatible?

First, imagine that after you get married your partner is involved in a horrible accident and cannot have sex. Would you dump that person? Of course not -- your relationship with that person is more important than sex. You love that person regardless. So sex is not at the center of a relationship.

That said, almost all sexual compatability problems can be solved with the help doctors/ sex therapists. In fact, sex problems are the number one reason why people go to therapists, and they are also the most successfully resolved problem. If two people are capable of having sex, then they are almost always capable of having enjoyable sex. But the key to great sex is not related to sexual compatability. The quality of sex depends primarily on the context of the relationship between the two people. The best sex in the world is between two people who love each other within a committed, lifetime relationship.