The Lawrence Journal-World covers the story here. Why won’t the Darwinists at KU debate philosopher and mathematician William Dembski, who will be speaking at a campus forum Jan. 28?

Leonard Krishtalka, director of KU’s Biodiversity Institute, said he was one scientist who declined an invitation to debate Dembski.
“There is nothing to debate,” Krishtalka said. “Intelligent design is religion thinly disguised as science and does not belong in the science classroom.”

I wonder if Krishtalka could at least take the time to show that intelligent design is a religion-based argument. Let’s set the bar really low for his opening statement.

Find a passage anywhere in Dembski’s Cambridge University Press monograph, The Design Inference, or in his follow-up academic book on the subject, No Free Lunch, that bases one of its arguments on a religious premise, that is, appeals to religious authority. Krishtalka can also peruse Michael Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box, and Stephen Meyer’s peer-reviewed essay arguing that intelligent design best explains the Cambrian explosion.

One clarification on the ground rules. It won’t do to uncover where one of these scholars (in an op-ed or interview, for instance) discusses the implications of intelligent design, or mentions his own personal religious beliefs, such as Michael Behe noting that he is Catholic. If this could be used to characterize a theory, then one could point to Catholic Darwinist Kenneth Miller’s ruminations about Darwinism and religion to characterize the modern theory of evolution as a Catholic-based argument.