Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith

by K. Scott Oliphint

Daniel Dennett in like fashion argues in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea that the “dangerous idea” we glean from Darwin is that the complexity of design in the world is itself dependent on blind chance—coin flips, if you like—and on nothing else. No matter how impressive the products . . . , the underlying process always consists of nothing but a set of individually mindless steps succeeding each other without the help of any intelligent supervision; they are “automatic” by definition: the workings of an automaton.14 Not only so, but Dennett takes Darwin’s dangerous idea and makes his own argument personal: “To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant—inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write.”